The ongoing investigation into the student loan industry is continuing to air out universities' dirty laundry.
On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo revealed that the directors of financial aid at Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California each held personal stock in a student loan company, Student Loan Xpress, that they had been recommending to students.
This news comes after Penn's voluntary $1.6 million settlement with Cuomo over its previously undisclosed revenue-sharing agreement with Citibank.
Thus far, Penn and Columbia are the only two schools in the Ivy League to be implicated in Cuomo's investigation.
According to documents and figures acquired by the Attorney General, Columbia, Texas and USC officials sold their stocks in 2003.
The executive director of financial aid at Columbia, David Charlow, is said to have earned a profit of $100,000.
The Attorney General's office has also found that Charlow reportedly sat on the executive board of Student Loan Xpress.
"As a result of the attention generated by the Attorney General's investigation, we learned that, until 2005, a financial aid administrator at Columbia . had a financial interest in one of our preferred lenders," Columbia spokesman Robert Hornsby wrote in a statement.
"We promptly began an investigation, placed the officer on leave pending a full review and notified the Attorney General," he said.
Cuomo's office did not return repeated requests for comment.
Columbia, unlike Penn, was not previously part of Cuomo's investigation, having not been a part of any revenue-sharing agreements.
At Penn, officials are saying that these actions spell bad news for the student loan industry, in which dozens of schools nationwide have been targets of Cuomo's investigation.
"I am devastated by this," said Penn's Associate Vice President for Finance Frank Claus. "To be on a for-profit board - that's not right for people in our business to do that."
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