The student loan scandal in which NYU is embroiled is rather interesting. And not so much for the sensationalized ledes it has yielded, ':

A community college financial aid director was at a meeting a year ago with a group of colleagues from other institutions. Over lunch, one of the aid directors “brazenly admitted to pitting one lender against another so that he could get the best NBA playoff seats.” The community college official, who asked not to be named, was horrified that an aid officer would be encouraging lenders to in essence bid on his good will. Others aren’t shocked.

In part what we are talking about is "kickbacks" in the form of stock and other benefits less extraordinary than basketball tickets to university financial aid officials, apparently in exchange for steering students to certain lenders. Citibank recently reached a settlement which requires it to pay 1.4 million dollars back to NYU students. The WSN says this is about $60 per afflicted student. In the Citibank case, the bank "offered to share profits with the university,"
which suggests that financial aid repayments to an outside financial corporation are being in part funneled back to the university which spends next to no money on financial aid, which seems particularly disturbing to me. NYU administrators claim the money was only spent on financial aid, but offer no evidence to support this claim. It may be that what is needed is a complete overhaul of the way tuition and aid are handled by the federal government and an end to funding cuts at the state level, but this should not exculpate wealthy, elite private universities from taking a far greater role to ensure a diverse, just system of financial aid for its students.