Issue date: 3/4/08 Section: News

After the online newspaper Inside HigherEd reported in January that Wharton MBA Admissions officer Judith Hodara was consulting for a Japanese admissions firm and also owned a consulting business catering to high-school students, observers and members of the higher-education community quickly labeled the activities as a conflict of interest.

A few days later, Penn also spoke out, saying it "does not consider this type of situation appropriate, which is why it has been ended."

The gravity of the infractions, though, is difficult to ascertain because both relationships dealt only indirectly with her job duties.

But these revelations came less than a year after other areas of the higher-education industry, most notably the financial-aid sector, came under serious legal scrutiny for conflicts-of-interest allegations and spurned debate among experts about the true nature of conflicts of interest at a university level.

Student loans history

Last spring, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made waves when he sent letters to over 400 colleges and universities, including Penn, requesting that their financial-aid offices end certain relationships with student-loan companies that, he said in a press release, were "filled with the potential for conflicts of interest" and in some instances broke the law.

Cuomo pointed to financial kickbacks, all-expense-paid resort vacations for financial-aid officers and financial-aid call centers staffed by lending-company employees.

Continued...

Page 1 of 4 next >

Article Tools