A Fresh Abuse Rattles College Admissions: Parents Give Up Custody of Their Children So They Can Get Student Aid

Another scandal is unfolding in the world of college admissions. Like Operation Varsity Blues, the infamous scheme that helped applicants cheat on standardized tests and bribe college coaches to get into elite institutions, this one appears to demonstrate the lengths to which more-affluent families will go to pave their children’s way through college.

This time it’s financial aid — not acceptance letters — that families are trying to secure. According to articles published on Monday by ProPublica Illinois and The Wall Street Journal, parents in the Chicago suburbs transferred the guardianship of their children to relatives or friends so that the children would qualify as independents. That way, the children did not have to report their parents’ income when they applied for federal, state, and university financial aid.

Now the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General is looking into the practice, The Wall Street Journal reports. The department is considering adding new language to the Federal Student Aid Handbook, according to the newspaper.

“The laws and regulations governing dependency status were created to help students who legitimately need assistance to attend college,” a spokeswoman for the Education Department said in an email. “Those who break the rules should be held accountable, and the department is committed to assessing what changes can be made — either independently or in concert with Congress — to protect taxpayers from those who seek to game the system.”

Admissions officers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign started to get suspicious about some of their admitted students in the summer of 2018. Andrew Borst, director of undergraduate admissions, said in an interview with The Chronicle that college counselors at high schools with affluent students started asking questions about their students’ interest in need-based programs.

Borst said the admissions officers looked at the students’ financial-aid applications and found similarities in the language students used to answer certain questions. They also noticed that each of those students had had their guardianship legally transferred to someone other than their parents in their junior year.

The University of Illinois found three students last summer who fit that pattern, Borst said. (The three did not include students who had guardians for other reasons, he said.) The admissions officers consulted with university lawyers and notified the U.S. Department of Education. There was nothing illegal about what the families were doing, Borst was told, so the university could not take away the students’ state or federal aid. They did “repackage” the university aid, he said.

“These families,” Borst said, “are indeed taking resources away from truly deserving” applicants. He explained that state financial aid is awarded on a first come, first served basis, so not all students who qualify receive it.

This year the University of Illinois began asking more questions of its admitted students who applied for financial aid and had recently had their guardianship legally transferred, such as who covered their cellphone bills and who paid for their health insurance, Borst said. The university is waiting for responses from 11 students who were asked those questions. Their admitted status is not at stake, but the financial aid awarded to them by the university could be affected.

ProPublica found more than 40 guardianship cases in the Chicago suburbs in 2018 and in the first half of 2019. The publication reported that most of the cases had been handled by one of two law firms: the Rogers Law Group, in Deerfield, Ill., and the Kabbe Law Group, in Naperville, Ill. Lawyers in the Rogers group did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.

Mari Berlin, a lawyer with the Kabbe group, said her clients were families who did not qualify for financial aid but still struggled to pay their child’s tuition.

“We understand that the majority of our clients would be considered middle-class families,” she said. “Many of the students we’ve helped believe they would not have been able to attend their college without the work that we did for them.”

Berlin estimated that she’s worked with 25 clients on this process in the last three years. She said the families come to her with the specific request that a guardian be appointed for their child.

Jill Desjean, a policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said she’d never heard of anything like this before. She said it would be a difficult thing for financial-aid officers to notice, because it’s not illegal.

Financial-aid officers can ask more questions of students, as Illinois is doing, but Desjean said admissions officers need to balance their efforts to prevent exploitation with ensuring that students who do need financial aid don’t get overwhelmed by bureaucratic hurdles.

“Any time you ask a student for more information, you introduce the possibility that they don’t follow up and they are not eligible to get financial aid because of it,” she said. “If this is their first time through the financial-aid process they may just assume, I’m not qualified for it.”

Borst said Illinois had tried carefully to find that balance. He spoke to admissions officers at five other colleges and universities in the Chicago area that were aware of the same issue, though he declined to name the others. He hopes admissions officers on other campuses will speak up when they see problems with the process that privilege wealthy families.

“Don’t be afraid to bring some things to light,” he said. “It may be small things, but it’s those things that can create a system that’s hampering our ability to create social mobility for families.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.