Brain Trusts

President of the debating team, 1300 on her boards, reads Noam Chomsky in her spare time, parents make $30,000 a year. Let's see, $3,000 in financial aid sounds about right. You on board, Brown? What about you, Barnard?

Every spring, exchanges like this occur among the deans of 23 top private colleges. The idea is to avoid bidding wars for students accepted by more than one college, and to ensure that institutions are similarly interpreting financial information submitted by parents. But the Justice Department has decided to look into this practice, as well as into the fact that within groupings -- the Ivy League schools and the Seven Sisters, for example -- yearly tuitions tend to be similar. Presumably Justice wants to determine whether there is any violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits restraint of trade.

The cost of college is a hot topic because tuitions will increase up to 9% this fall. Total costs at Harvard currently run about $20,000 a year; Maine's Colby College costs about $18,900. The similarity is not the result of price fixing, says Colby President William Cotter. The reason, he says, is "that a Ford costs about the same as a Chevy," or in the case of Harvard and Yale, a BMW costs about the same as a Jaguar. Cotter admits that the market is not price sensitive. "A family decides on private vs. public," he says. "But then they don't pick the cheapest within the category."

Colleges started sharing information in the 1950s. Now critics say the system is tantamount to price fixing. College officials disagree, but they are complying with the inquiry. "I've done almost nothing but work on this request since July 31," says Amherst College treasurer James Scott. It will be worth the effort, he says, if critics "bitching and moaning about college costs" come to see that no one is getting rich teaching the country's children.