The Brown University student who gained national attention for sending DOGE-style emails to thousands of Brown administrators is taking his battle against bureaucratic bloat beyond the walls of his Ivy League campus. He’s headed to Congress. 

On Wednesday, Alex Shieh, a rising junior at Brown, will testify before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on the topic of “anti-competitive behavior” at his university and within the Ivy League. He says that potential antitrust violations at Brown, including what he alleges are price-fixing and tying arrangements, are part of why the cost of tuition at Brown has soared to $96,000 a year.

“I know of many people who aren’t coming to Brown because it’s too much and their financial aid package isn’t enough,” Mr. Shieh tells the Sun. “I’m concerned about what this means for meritocracy and for the American dream.” 

The invitation for Mr. Shieh to speak before Congress is his latest triumph after Brown cleared him and the board of the Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication he had recently revived, of wrongdoing for asking non-faculty employees to describe what tasks they performed in the past week, as part of a project called Bloat@Brown. The project was inspired by how Elon Musk’s DOGE team emailed every federal employee asking them to list what they had done in their jobs that week. 

Private and public universities across the country have been criticized for dramatically growing their administrative staff — non-faculty jobs — at the same time as tuition costs have skyrocketed. These administrative staff can include a large bureaucracy to manage “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies, or DEI. 

Mr. Shieh used AI to scrape the contact details of all non-faculty staff at Brown from publicly available databases such as LinkedIn. The number totalled 3,805, by his count. Bloat@Brown, which lists the name and titles of Brown’s administrative staff, allows visitors to separate out DEI-focused jobs.

Brown subsequently initiated charges within the university’s internal judicial system against Mr. Shieh. The school’s review “has centered on investigating whether improper use of non-public Brown data or non-public data systems violated law or policy; whether deliberate targeting of individual employees violated law or policy; and whether violations to Brown’s misrepresentation or name use policies took place,” a spokesman for Brown, Brian Clark, tells the Sun. He added: “Since the start of this matter, Brown has proceeded in complete accordance with free expression guarantees and appropriate procedural safeguards under University policies and applicable law.”

“I think it’s very clear that there was a retaliatory motive,” Mr. Shieh says, “especially since the things that they came after me for were bogus, and I won.” When he visits Capitol Hill next week, Mr. Shieh plans to submit a list of “potentially redundant” administrative roles to enter the Congressional record. 

Bloat@Brown has garnered the attention of the man from which Mr. Shieh drew inspiration — former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, who tweeted “Wow” about the findings. Bill Ackman and Congressman Troy Nehls of Texas have also taken to X to defend Mr. Shieh’s work.

Yet what motivates Mr. Shieh appears not to be a quest for celebrity, nor retribution against his university. “My goal is to make education more affordable,” he says. “We know that the Ivy League pushes people into upper-income brackets, and the opportunities aren’t being evenly distributed.”

According to Opportunity Insights, an organization based at Harvard, attending “an Ivy-Plus college” (widely considered to comprise the eight Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago) instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases by 60 percent students’ chances of reaching the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution. It triples their chances of working at a prestigious company. The study concludes that if elite institutions amend their admissions policies, they could bolster the socioeconomic diversity of college campuses — and ultimately America’s leaders.

Ivy League colleges and their peers have made significant efforts to recruit more low-income students and subsidize tuition. Several now offer free tuition for families below a certain income — $200,000 at Harvard, $100,000 at Stanford and Princeton, $75,000 a Yale and $60,000 at Brown. These numbers don’t take into account the generous financial aid grants given to students with family incomes of $250,000 or lower that can pay a majority of tuition fees. Yet these generous policies aren’t enough for students from middle-class families, Mr. Shieh says. “Middle income students are actually the most underrepresented because they don’t get the benefit of generous scholarships.”

Mr. Shieh says there’s an easy solution to making elite institutions more accessible: cut the administrative excess. He looks to the model of Oxford and Cambridge, where the non-teaching faculty to student ratio is lower, and the annual tuition for international students cost around half of what it does at Brown, between £35,260 and £59,260.

Another solution is to take aim at the “Elite Universities Cartel,” as the title of Wednesday’s Congressional hearing proclaims. In April, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees sent letters to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and Yale, demanding information regarding the Ivy League schools’ “apparent collusion to raise tuition prices.”

The lawmakers cited accusations of anti-competitive trade practices, such as that the College Board, a nonprofit membership organization that provides higher education services, facilitated collusion among universities to reduce financial aid available to students. 

An ongoing antitrust lawsuit from 2022 has accused 17 universities of forming a “price-fixing cartel” that colluded to limit competition and reduced the amount of aid offered to students. In January of 2024, Brown, which has the lowest endowment among the eight Ivy League schools, agreed to pay $19.5 million to settle the suit, asserting that “the claims have no merit” but that “ongoing litigation would divert significant resources from Brown’s focus on its core priorities.”

Whatever its causes, the upward spiral in the price of an Ivy League degree will draw reprimand on Capitol Hill next week. Mr. Shieh appears to be emerging as its most ardent critic from within the Ivory Tower. He notes that his parents, who are physicians, can afford to pay his tuition. Still many cannot. “Elite institutions today are not elite in the sense that there’s the best and the brightest,” he says. That’s the aspiration, he says, but today, “elite means elitist.”