Dad Faces 20 Years for Cheating Harvard Financial Aid

[KamaAina]

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/dad-faces-20-years-for-cheating-harvard-financial-105025103717.html

The College Board recently reported that college costs are finally decelerating — tuition grew just 2.9 percent this year versus the roughly 7 percent it’s been growing each year for decades. But they’re still growing faster than household incomes, creating a desperate situation for many parents — including, apparently, the dad of a former Harvard University student, who admitted Tuesday that he resorted to lying to get his daughter’s financial aid. He now he faces up to 20 years in prison for the deception.

Joseph N. Fonge pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Boston to three counts of wire fraud for falsifying his income. The changes he made scored his daughter more than $160,000 in financial aid from the university and the federal government over three years. (For context, the national average for undergrad financial aid was $14,180 per full-time student last year.)

The father’s inaccurate federal income tax returns misrepresented the student’s need in the College Scholarship Service profile and Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for tuition help at Harvard, where 70 percent of attendees get financial aid to cover the $58,607 yearly cost. And that’s not all: Fonge is also on the hook for defrauding the University of Rochester $46,600 for another daughter back in 2010. He is scheduled to be sentenced March 4.

But this fraud doesn’t surprise college planning expert Bev Taylor. “Falsifying documents regarding college applications is no big news these days,” the Ivy Coach tells Yahoo Parenting. “Kids are falsifying documents all the time, cheating on the SATs and such.”

The sad thing is that Harvard and the other Ivies (including Yale; Y'85 here) have some of the most generous packages around, thank to their giant endowments (financially, anyway )

[merrily]

1. Very wrong, but so is the cost of a college education and the cost of student loans.

[Horse with no Name]

2. Yes he did wrong

but then, the monied folks lie all the time and it is just "business as usual".

[SummerSnow]

3. But Wall Street criminals don't go to jail