College Board Settles Probe into Kickback Scheme

December 8, 2008— -- The College Board, best known for designing and administering SAT and Advance Placement tests, today settled an investigation into charges that it swapped favorable pricing for its services to colleges in exchange for the colleges favorably marketing its student loan products under the heading "preferred lender" -- a category that a wide ranging probe into industry practices found was often was unrelated to any favorable loan rate.

The settlement was announced by the Attorney Generals of New York and Connecticut.

The College Board is the 22nd student lender to reach a settlement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo since 2007 when he began investigating questionable marketing practices in the $85 billion student loan industry.

Those practices included listing a lender's student loan offerings as "preferred" whether or not the loan rates were the best available.

Often, Cuomo's office found, this was done in exchange for a fee to the college, or an inducement to the financial aid officer in the form of consulting fees, which included $70,000 harbor cruises and shares in the lender's company.

One former financial aid director at Johns Hopkins University who cultivated a national reputation as a stickler for ethics, according to the Washington Post, "accepted more than $130,000 from eight lending industry companies during her tenure, twice as much money as previously disclosed."

The College Board involvement in lending, and the swapping of favorable pricing for its financial aid products and services in exchange for favorable placement of its loan products, is yet another example of questionable marketing practices, according to Cuomo.

"The investigation found that the College Board, known best to students as the entity which develops and administers college admission tests such as the SAT and advanced placement (AP) tests, also acted as a lender and marketer of higher education loans," Cuomo said.

"At the same time, the College Board developed and marketed numerous products and services related to student financial assistance and gave significant discounts on those products and services to certain collegesin exchange for placement of the College Board's loans on the colleges' preferred lender list of student lenders," said Cuomo.