U.S. House Democrats and Republicans shared opposing viewpoints Wednesday on ways to address the rising costs of college tuition in the U.S.
In a House subcommittee hearing, Republican and Democrat members questioned a panel of witnesses on antitrust policies of Ivy League institutions.
U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Ill., called attention to a lawsuit filed by a group of former students in 2022 accusing the nation’s top universities of favoring wealthy student applicants over others. Fitzgerald said the schools use personal financial data to determine how much a family can afford to pay and charge them that amount.
“By setting the industry standard for tuition, the Ivy League creates an umbrella effect that allows other colleges to charge more than they could in a competitive market,” Fitzgerald said.
Democrat members agreed that tuition prices are too high but criticized Republicans support of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which cut to Pell grant spending and other student aid programs.
“If they really cared about consumer prices they would not undermine the ability of all students, especially low-income students, to access and afford higher education,” U.S. Rep. Jarrod Nadler, D-N.Y., said about Republican members.
The “One Big, Beautiful Bill” includes limits on amounts students can borrow, narrows eligibility of Pell grant recipients and aims to hold universities accountable for student loans that go into default.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., took his criticisms of the Trump administration further as he argued against reducing student aid amounts.
“This is breathtaking duplicity to claim that the Ivy League schools are conspiring against their students to make tuition unaffordable when House Republicans are complicit in the largest setback in access to higher education for working-class Americans in decades,” Raskin said.
Witnesses on the panel testified to markers of antitrust violations and some of the nation’s top institutions.
Scott Martin, a partner at Hausfeld – a Washington, D.C. based law firm – said the nonprofit status, small acceptance rates and high endowments of elite universities point to a possible disregard of antitrust laws.
U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wa., compared the behavior of elite universities to diamond supply companies in their tactics of pricing, value and marketing.
“The right price for college should be the price in which a student can get through with zero debt,” Baumgartner said.
Alex Shieh, a junior at Brown University, said the institution suffered under “an empire of administrative bloat and bureaucracy.” Several weeks ago, Shieh sent DOGE-like emails to the administrative staff at Brown asking what they did for their jobs that week.
Julie Margaretta Morgan, a witness on the panel and president of the progressive think tank The Century Foundation, said the focus for higher education costs should be on community colleges and state institutions because they educate a larger amount of students nationwide.
Morgan said the price state institutions charge for tuition largely depends on state appropriations. She suggested that federal aid for education should increase to allow state appropriations to also provide more to educational institutions, which she said would lower the price of college tuition.
“If we are not investing in the institutions that most of our students go to, we are compounding the problem,” U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., said.
