Five universities in the United States agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing them of colluding on financial aid and admissions violations, according to new court filings. Yale, Columbia, Duke, Brown and Emory universities will pay a combined US$104.5 million to settle their portions of the case, which was brought by five former students against more than a dozen schools. The suit alleges the universities violated antitrust law when they ignored their pledge to not weigh a student’s ability to pay tuition fees when considering whether or not to accept, a practice referred to as ‘need-blind’ admission.

Three Georgia women and an Alabama man pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US Department of Education’s Federal financial aid programs worth millions of dollars. According to the Justice Department, they admitted enrolling people who were not eligible to attend college and completing financial aid applications using fake students’ names; they also did fake students’ homework and exams and manipulated grade requirements to continue qualifying for Federal financial aid.

The Department of Justice reports that two education officials have been sentenced to jail after pleading guilty to fraudulently enrolling people in virtual schools and then claiming money from public funds on their behalf. The districts received payments from the Alabama Education Trust Fund as if the students were attending public schools while the defendants misappropriated state money through direct cash payments and payments to third-party contractors owned by various co-conspirators.

San Diego Ashford University, and its parent company, Zovio, have been fined US$22.37 million for fraudulent admissions tactics that left some students in serious debt and without degrees. According to San Diego Superior Court judge, the college has made bogus claims about career outcomes, costs and financial aid to lure vulnerable students to enrol in the online university programmes.

School officials in the city of Athens and Limestone County have conspired to obtain more public funding by claiming to enrol full-time private students in the system's virtual schools. The two school districts were improperly paid around $7 million in state education funding for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years. By November 2017, more than 500 private school students were fraudulently enrolled in Athens Renaissance schools and over 50 students in Conecuh County.

The Florida Department of Education revealed that the Sarasota County School District falsified records and placed students on alternate assessment to avoid state testing or accountability in order to benefit financially. Investigators found that 27 of 66 sampled students’ files did not include sufficient documentation to demonstrate that they were placed correctly.

The director of the Training Domain, an educational institution in Fort Meyers designed to improve students ‘employability skills, has been charged with 10 counts of wire fraud and one count of Federal Student Assistance (FSA) fraud. From July 2017 to April 2019, she assisted students in applying for financial aid but instead of using the loan and grant proceeds to hold classes and for other educational expenses, the director kept the FSA fund and split them with students. She also created false and fraudulent high school diplomas.

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. The investigative team had been created in 2016 after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, which set off a wave of complaints from students about predatory activities at for-profit schools. The institutions had been accused of widespread fraud that involved misrepresenting enrolment benefits, job placement rates and program offerings, which could leave students with huge debts and no degrees.

More than 160 students — nearly 30 percent of the student body — at D.C.’s celebrated Duke Ellington School of the Arts live outside the city and are not paying the tuition required of suburbanites who attend the District’s public schools, an internal investigation has found. The findings, which city officials announced Friday, come amid intensifying distrust of the District’s public schools, stoked by scandals involving inflated graduation rates and a former chancellor skirting enrolment rules for his daughter.

Ohio Auditor’s opponent in the state attorney general’s race said that he should immediately have referred to authorities a whistleblower’s allegations that the state’s then-largest online charter school intentionally inflated attendance figures. The Education Department previously found that the school significantly over-reported its number of full-time-equivalent students and owed the state $60 million for the 2015-2016 school year. Another $19 million penalty was assessed for 2016-2017.