Forty college athletics departments, from Georgetown to Auburn to Kansas to UCLA, were ensnared Wednesday in a New York state investigation of irregularities in the college loan industry, USA Today reports.
Widening an inquiry into whether kickbacks were accepted for steering students to loan providers, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that his office had served the athletics departments , 38 in the NCAA’s top-tier Division I , with subpoenas and records requests.
Also subpoenaed was a Florida-based loan provider, Student Financial Services Inc., doing business as University Financial Services (UFS).
“We suspect that UFS has relationships with these athletic departments,” Cuomo spokesman Jeffrey Lerner said, “and we want to know exactly what these relationships entail.”
At least a dozen of the schools feature loan-consolidation links on their athletics websites that take viewers to a UFS page customized with schools’ colors.
