Good morning!

I'm in the midst of three college drop-offs over a grueling,10 day stretch, but wanted to tell you about two financial aid-related stories that caught my bleary eyes over the past couple of days.

The first was about alleged price fixing among elite colleges.

The second related to incredible, nauseating amounts of cash spent by public universities on the most STUPID stuff.

Sadly, neither of these stories is breaking news. This stuff has been going on longer than the 21+ years I've been a college advisor.  

The first story was about U Chicago paying $13.5M to settle allegations of financial aid price-fixing.  I'm embarrassed to say that I don't quite get the plaintiff's point. According to the summary I read, it looked like the allegation was that U Chicago colluded with 16 colleges, including Brown, Columbia, MIT and Duke. 

But the collusion was not about U Chicago sharing their applicants' files and coming up with identical awards, they way the Ivies used to do back...

If you like money, you'll want to watch the interview I just did with my friend and colleague, scholarship search expert and bundle of energy Jean O'Toole.

Here's the scoop on what we covered:

• What's the deal with those weirdo, gimmicky, obscure or just plain wack-a-doo special scholarships that everyone talks about?
• Which scholarship search websites are actually worth spending time on?
• How to sniff out a scholarship scam and avoid getting ripped off
• The best time to start your search for scholarships (this will surprise you)
• The oddball reason corporations need you to take their scholarship money
• How to win a scholarship for an "Invisible Disability"
• A ninja way to "raid" high school scholarships -- Pretty sneaky, sis!
• Are there really scholarships for families who don't qualify for financial aid?
• The biggest mistake families make in the scholarship search process
• More

This was a high energy, high octane interview, so I hope you check it out and get ready to take a who...

Early this week the Wall Street Journal "exposed" New York University as being THE WORST college when it comes to financial aid generosity.

The piece painted a pretty bleak picture, pointing out that, for a college with an endowment north of 1 Billion, NYU ranked 1st in the ignominious category of parent loan (PLUS) debt per family and other related areas.

The article featured a grad student, a woman, who sold her eggs in order to pay for tuition.  Twice!

(No word on whether the eggs would receive favorable legacy status once fertilized into college applicants in the indeterminate future.)

We in the college advising biz have known NYU to be, again, THE WORST, stingiest college known to mankind for years, so this article was less than a surprise.

I've witnessed parents and kids tempted -- and sometime succumbing to that temptation despite my best efforts -- to blow 80K per year for a theater education at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Three of my four kiddos did or do theater...a...