Member News

Dartmouth College and Northwestern and Vanderbilt Universities have become the latest institutions to settle a financial aid antitrust lawsuit that accused 17 institutions of illegally colluding for decades to limit student financial aid packages. Dartmouth will pay $33.75 million, Northwestern $43.5 million, and Vanderbilt $55 million. The class action case filed in January 2022 alleges that the highly selective universities effectively operated a “cartel” by colluding in the way they calculated financial aid awards. As a result, thousands of students overpaid for their education, plaintiffs argue.
 

University of Pikeville President Dr. Burton Webb said that the message he recently carried to the annual meeting and advocacy day held by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities is the same message he carries with him when he travels for the university. "The problems that exist in rural America will be solved by the ideas that arise out of rural America," he said. "We have it within us to solve our own issues, and so we can and we should, and we are."

Assistant Editorial Page Writer Nicole Ault writes:  If Macy Gunnell, a sophomore at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind., hadn’t been listening during her shift at the school’s admissions office, she might have missed the news: The all-women’s Catholic college was planning to admit trans-identifying men the next academic year.
That would have undermined 180 years of school tradition, not to mention centuries of church teaching. Since the Sisters of the Holy Cross founded the college in 1844, it has admitted women only. “What alarmed me about the policy is the fact that it was not in accordance with the school’s foundations” or “basic” Catholic principles, Ms. Gunnell says.

La Roche University (PA) has named as its eighth president Christina Clark, former provost at Marywood University (PA), who has spent two decades as an academic at comprehensive Catholic universities. Officials announced the hiring Thursday. She takes office in July as the school’s second lay president in its 61-year history. Clark succeeds Sister Candace Introcaso, who died on May 22, 2023.

In 2019, Lynn Ortale was asked to be on a peer review committee for a college in Albany, New York that was seeking accreditation through the Middle States Commission. It was her first time seeing Maria College and her first time in the area — and she loved it. A few years later, she received a message from an academic hiring platform inquiring about her interest in a newly open position as president of Maria. Ortale had been in higher education for more than 30 years, and had been vice president at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia for 13 years. After thinking it over, she decided to put her hat into the ring, and was named Maria College’s sixth president in 2022.