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Washington University in St. Louis — criticized a decade ago for rock-bottom low-income enrollment — says it has carved out spaces for economically disadvantaged students as part of a new plan to increase need-based aid. Late last year, the university announced that 21% of its freshmen were Pell eligible, meaning they showed financial need after filling out a federal student aid application, and 17% were the first in their families to attend college. Currently, Pell-eligible students make up around 18.5% of Ivy League students and 40% at other institutions, according to a study by policy analysts at the HEA Group.

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.