Dive Brief:

• Noodle Founder John Katzman is asking the U.S. Department of Education to crack down on colleges that pay search sites for favorable standings and prospective student leads.
• The education search site founder says the under secretary of education should tell colleges that they are violating federal student aid rules if they don’t prominently disclose how the websites work, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
• According to a Noodle survey, about 70% of the respondents believed they knew how the search site results were created, but only about 5-7% knew about the payment arrangements between colleges and the sites.

Dive Insight:

Katzman’s money quote to the Chronicle: "If substandard schools are tumors on the body of higher education, these sites serve as their blood supply."

He says the colleges that don’t disclose their search site payment arrangements are essentially responsible for misrepresentation and false endorsements. Katzman, who started Princeton Review Inc. and co-founded 2U, a distance education company, before launching Noodle, started to become interested in the pay-for-search-results issue while at 2U, which was buying leads from the search sites.