A woman has filed a lawsuit against American Airlines, saying a man sexually assaulted her during a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Dallas last year.

Barbara Morgan, a California resident, said that shortly after the flight took off and the lights were dimmed, the man sitting next to her in the middle seat started rubbing his arms against her in a deliberate attempt to touch her breasts.

She tried to create some distance from the man, Ms. Morgan said, but he was undeterred. “He placed his hand on the plaintiff’s upper thigh, slid it up toward her vagina and fondled her genitals,” the complaint said, adding that the man put a bag on his lap to conceal an erection.

The lawsuit, filed on April 24 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, one year after the alleged incident, said that the accused, Cherian Abraham, had been reported to the airline previously, but was allowed to keep flying. In March, Mr. Abraham was arrested and charged by federal investigators with abusive sexual contact linked to three incidents of sexual assault on airplanes, including the one against Ms. Morgan. Mr. Abraham pleaded not guilty to all charges and a trial has been scheduled for Aug. 4. His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last month, the F.B.I. reported that sexual assault on airplanes is on the rise, with 104 cases investigated by the bureau in 2024, up from 96 in 2023. The agency warned that the number of incidents could be higher as some cases may have gone unreported.

“Sexual assaults typically occur on long commercial flights, and offenders tend to be male, seated directly next to the victim, and under the influence of alcohol or drugs,” the F.B.I. said in a statement published on its website last month. “They may try to conceal their activities, for instance, by using a blanket to cover the victim or taking advantage of a darkened cabin.”

In her legal complaint against American Airlines and Mr. Abraham, Ms. Morgan accused the airline of negligence, stating that flight attendants rarely walked through the cabin and failed to respond to her distress signals when she twice yelled, “Stop.” When she reported the incident at the arrival gate, she said the American Airlines agent engaged in “victim blaming,” asking why she hadn’t taken further action to report the incident during the flight.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Morgan said she “froze” after the incident, fearing that if she made a scene, the man would retaliate or the flight would be rerouted, which would anger other passengers.

“The safety of our customers and team members is our highest priority,” an American Airlines spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We take this matter very seriously and are working closely with law enforcement on its investigation.”

Mr. Abraham has since been barred from flying with the airline.

“The F.B.I. and American Airlines passengers have repeatedly warned the airline that in-flight sexual assaults are occurring on American Airlines flights — and American Airlines has had every opportunity to take those warnings seriously. Instead, they’ve turned a blind eye, leaving passengers vulnerable at 30,000 feet,” said Patrick J. Driscoll, an attorney for Romanucci & Blandin, the law firm representing Ms. Morgan.

“This isn’t just a failure of policy; it’s a failure of basic responsibility.”

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan that would require placebo-controlled studies for all new vaccines, surprising some experts who noted that such testing already routinely takes place.

In a statement, Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that “all new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials” before approval, and called the move a “radical departure” from existing standards.

Even though modern studies routinely use placebos, one exception has been the Covid booster shots, which have been authorized without human trials to target new strains of the virus as it has evolved. It’s unclear how the announcement will affect availability of Covid vaccines that were expected to be updated for the fall.

Mr. Kennedy also announced an effort Thursday for the National Institutes of Health to turbocharge the development of new inoculations for Covid, bird flu and seasonal flu.

The new vaccine development initiative would involve methods other than the mRNA technology used to develop the dominant Covid vaccines that are already in use, a statement from the Health and Human Services department said. The mRNA shots have been the subject of conspiracy theories, and Mr. Kennedy has intensely criticized them.

Taken together, the moves suggest that Mr. Kennedy will reach far into the details of vaccine development, an effort likely informed by his decades as one of the nation’s most vocal critics of immunization oversight.

Though some scientists say the quest to fully understand the possible unanticipated effects of vaccines is worthwhile, they also warn that doing so in a way that delays approval of lifesaving shots could jeopardize public health.

Mr. Kennedy’s activism in recent years included petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to pull the Covid vaccine off the market in 2021, during a deadly phase of the pandemic. He also urged the F.D.A. not to authorize Covid shots for children.

Asked about how the new testing policy would affect Covid booster shots, Mr. Nixon suggested that new trials could be requested. Though the vaccines authorized by the F.D.A. were initially studied in large trials against placebos, Mr. Kennedy and others have criticized the lack of clinical trials for the boosters.

“As we’ve said before, trials from four years ago conducted in people without natural immunity no longer suffice,” Mr. Nixon said. “A four-year-old trial is also not a blank check for new vaccines each year without clinical trial data, unlike the flu shot which has been tried and tested for more than 80 years. The public deserves transparency and gold-standard science — especially with evolving products.”

Pfizer and Moderna, makers of the mRNA Covid shots, did not respond immediately to requests for comment. The Washington Post first reported the policy shift.

Dr. Ofer Levy, a Harvard vaccine researcher and a member of the F.D.A.’s vaccine advisory committee, said exploring possible unexpected effects from vaccines would be a valuable effort. But he said officials must “thread the needle” to be sure it is done in a way that did not leave older and immunocompromised people unprotected from Covid.

He said that leaving a group taking the placebo vulnerable to Covid posed ethical concerns that would need to be carefully considered. Holding up authorization for updated Covid shots would be “unacceptable,” he said.

“Tens of thousands of people can die without protection against Covid,” said Dr. Levy, who co-founded a company working on an opioid vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported about 23,000 deaths from Covid since September, with as many as 1,000 a week that month and in January. Still, uptake of the Covid boosters has been low: About 23 percent of adults got the updated Covid shot released in the fall, according to the C.D.C.

Mr. Kennedy’s familiarity with the issue stems at least in part from his reviews of decades-old vaccine approvals, including for the polio vaccine and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. He has also helped represent plaintiffs in lawsuits against manufacturers.

He and the organization he founded and once led, Children’s Health Defense, have repeatedly complained that vaccines are not tested against placebos in clinical trials when they are being developed. The organization has cited polio, hepatitis and meningitis vaccines as examples, all vaccines that were introduced decades ago.

“Every other medicine is tested against a placebo,” Mr. Kennedy said on a podcast in January 2020, in claiming that vaccines are exempt from that requirement.

That, however, is not entirely correct. Cancer drugs and other medications authorized under the F.D.A.’s accelerated approval program are regularly authorized after trials without a placebo. And new vaccines, including the vaccines for Covid, were tested against placebos — inert substances, such as a saline injection, or in some cases against vaccines for other diseases.

But new formulations of already approved vaccines are compared to those in existing vaccines in clinical trials, because it would be considered unethical to withhold effective vaccines from patients, including infants.

“We’ve required placebo-controlled trials for most vaccines, and sometimes it’s an inert placebo, and sometimes it’s an irrelevant vaccine,” said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official until he was forced out in March. “The claim that we have not done randomized trials for pediatric vaccines aside from Covid is not correct.”

Mr. Kennedy has also raised concerns in the past about testing a vaccine against what many consider a reasonable placebo: the same formula, but without the immune-activating agents. Mr. Kennedy has noted that the practice leaves uncertainty about whether ingredients in the formula could cause harm.

The announcement that the National Institutes of Health will develop new technology for making flu and coronavirus vaccines to prevent against pandemics appears aimed at displacing the mRNA vaccine technology that has been a target of critics, including the health secretary.

This “next-generation vaccine platform” would be “fully government-owned,” the department said. The N.I.H. helped develop the mRNA platform, and the vaccine maker Moderna paid the government hundreds of millions of dollars to license a key patent on the vaccine, though the company and the government later got into a dispute over the patent rights.

The mRNA platform relies on small bits of genetic code, which generated online rumors and conspiracy theories that it was being used to insert microchips into vaccine recipients. The new platform, by contrast, would rely on a more traditional method of vaccine development, which uses inactivated viruses to provoke an immune response.

The department said the new platform would be developed using beta-Propilactone, which is already a component in vaccine development but is considered a hazardous substance by the Environmental Protection Agency when people are exposed to it in large doses.

Last month, four Republicans from the House and Senate sent letters to the presidents of Ivy League schools demanding years of data about how they decide what to charge.

These institutions, the letters said, “establish the industry standard for tuition pricing, creating an umbrella effect for all colleges and universities to justify higher tuition costs than they could otherwise charge in a competitive market.”

In fact, no more than a few dozen other schools can command Ivy League prices from a high percentage of their students and their families. Every other private institution — and most public ones — compete brutally on price up until the May 1 reply date each year (and sometimes afterward). The average tuition discount among private colleges is now over 56 percent for first-time, full-time students.

Those discounts — which often come in the form of merit scholarships — can make a six-figure difference in what families pay over four years. This aid is different and often less predictable than the need-based kind that depends on a family’s income and assets.

The driving force behind college pricing is not some evil genius at Harvard or Penn. Instead, it’s a series of algorithms developed quietly over decades by consulting firms operating just out of sight. The two biggest — EAB and Ruffalo Noel Levitz, or RNL — are owned by private equity firms.

To understand how all this happened — and how things really work today, for families and the financiers hoping to make money off this opaque system — we need to turn the clock back 50 years to when an unlikely character took over the admissions department at Boston College and upended everything.

Leveraging Teenagers

Jack Maguire attended Boston College as an undergraduate and stuck around for a Ph.D. in physics. Not long after earning the degree, he took up a post as an assistant professor in 1968.

Today, Boston College has a $4.1 billion endowment and rejects 87.5 percent of applicants. But when Mr. Maguire started working there, it was a struggling commuter school running a deficit.

A young physics professor was an unlikely person to turn to when the college was having trouble finding a new dean of admission. Still, the school asked Mr. Maguire, now 85, to take a look. “They couldn’t find anyone else,” he said in a recent interview.

Calling on him made a certain amount of sense. He was on the schools committee in Lexington, Mass., where he lived, so he was plugged into one community feeding students to the college.

When Mr. Maguire examined the college’s data, he smelled opportunity. What if the school gave out precision-guided discounts based on the quality of the applicant even more than it did based on what students could afford? Turns out, when you do that, more of the above-average students say yes to the offer.

As new patterns emerged, Mr. Maguire fed data into computers. The machines had additional suggestions. Experiment and iterate, repeat until solvent.

Word of Mr. Maguire’s results spread quickly in the clubby world of admissions. In 1983, having helped turn Boston College around, he and his wife, Linda Cox Maguire — then the director of admissions at nearby Simmons College, now Simmons University — started their own consulting firm, Maguire Associates.

When Boston University was contemplating what might happen to market demand if it did away with its N.C.A.A. football team, Maguire Associates found that applicants were more likely to have attended an opera than a game. Goodbye, football.

Within 10 years of the founding of Maguire Associates, the predecessor firms for Ruffalo Noel Levitz and EAB were getting off the ground. They did what Mr. Maguire had done at Boston College, but they developed other tools, too, and became soup-to-nuts school whisperers.

One or both can help a college buy hundreds of thousands of names of teenagers who have taken the ACT or SAT, market to them across various media, improve retention once they arrive on campus and raise money from alumni more effectively.

For many years, the firms described the Maguire-esque part of their offerings as “financial aid leveraging.” Eventually, worried that the term might evoke images of the firms using money as a crowbar to wedge themselves into teenagers’ brains and parents’ pocketbooks, they rebranded their service as the more benign “financial aid optimization.”

Maguire Associates never grew anywhere near as big as EAB and RNL, and those two juggernauts have not been shy about the zealousness with which they made their industry more like the Wall Street firms that invest in them.

“I actually think of financial aid optimization as a form of arbitrage,” Madeleine Rhyneer, whom EAB refers to as its “dean” of enrollment management, said on a company podcast about how admissions offices “actually” work. “Really, it is. It’s like working in the financial markets.”

EAB provided a more tempered framing of its work in a statement from Ms. Rhyneer. “EAB partners with a variety of schools to help them fulfill their missions and educate broader populations of students,” she said. “In today’s rapidly evolving higher education landscape, that means engagement and scholarship strategies that raise awareness about college options and make college accessible to as many students as possible.”

This work is a relatively small chunk of both firms’ revenues, but it’s the thing that raises parental eyebrows the highest.

Politicians have noticed, too. Those letters last month suggested that “nonpublic algorithms for admissions and financial aid” could indicate that the schools are able to “engage in algorithmic collusion.”

Financial Aid Arbitrage

The optimization process begins with the hoovering up of more data about teenagers and their families than one might think possible.

The process starts with demographic, socioeconomic, geographic, academic, curricular and extracurricular information — anything and everything you tell a school when requesting information or applying.

Once a school has a good-sized target list, the pitches begin. Families know this routine; one mother in Ohio sent me a 63-pound box of all the mail her daughter received from collegiate suitors.

If the targeted individuals show interest, then the consultants offer colleges tools to track teenagers’ digital interactions with clients in real time.

Brian Zucker, 68, founder and chief executive of Human Capital Resource Corporation, has been competing with EAB and RNL for years. He and his colleagues refer to this real-time data as footprints in the sand.

“It changes minute by minute,” he said. “It’s texts, visits, clicks, opens, number of seconds on a particular webpage using a particular URL, monitoring forms, of which there are many.”

EAB, in a presentation called “Strategic Use of Grant Aid 101,” discusses up to 200 variables that schools can use when setting an individual admitted student’s price, drawing from data on over 350 clients and 1.5 billion “student interactions.” RNL has over 1,900 clients feeding the tweaking of its various models, from financial aid to fund-raising.

“You have to know how to manage these data and aggregate them, because if they’re presented as individual variables, they just look like vomit,” Mr. Zucker said. “Any individual click doesn’t mean diddly.”

The output from the data gathering often manifests as a matrix, according to Brad Pochard, a former vice president of enrollment management at Furman University who is now an adviser to Moore College Data, which helps colleges sort and view large amounts of information. Imagine two axes — one that measures ability to pay and another that rates academic accomplishment.

There might be 40 or more “cells” in the matrix, with a different price for each one.

So a school makes an opening bid. For lower-income families, it might refer to the discount off the school’s list price as need-based aid. Or for a more affluent family, it could call the discount a “presidential scholarship” — or anything, really, that it thinks will get in a student’s head and sway their decision.

But it is only an opening bid, and each year, more families realize that and delay coming to a decision until days before the deadline, when they ask for a better deal. Often, they get one.

Round-the-Clock Shift Work

At College of Charleston, a public university in South Carolina, just 12 percent of admitted students to the Class of 2028 said yes to its offers of admission.

Larger public schools in the state, like the University of South Carolina and Clemson, have big rah-rah energy and are fearsome competitors. But they can lack intimacy, and they’re not in one of the most beautiful cities in America.

College of Charleston brought in EAB to help market those advantages. It has paid the firm roughly $500,000 per year for its help (and for all the names on its prospect lists).

At various points each year, new names and the data on those individuals become available from the entities that administer the SAT and ACT.

“We have developed systems and processes (including round the clock shift work) that ensures our partners are consistently first in the inbox and in the mailbox,” the company said in a written pitch to College of Charleston, which I obtained through a public records request.

One of the best ways for a public school to maximize revenue is to attract more students paying out-of-state tuition. The playbook goes something like this:

1) Buy a pile of names of students from appropriately affluent ZIP codes and pitch them relentlessly with a gripping case for going far from home.

2) Upgrade the admissions staff, adding people with corporate sales experience, as the College of Charleston did.

3) Set a high tuition price, creating the perception of value.

4) To make prospects feel especially exalted, offer a fat academic scholarship — but not so much that they aren’t still paying more than in-state students.

“We shifted from awarding top scholars to those who were not receiving merit-based scholarships, and that helped increase our yield quite a bit,” said College of Charleston’s president, Andrew T. Hsu.

That quote comes from a Q&A that appeared on EAB’s website last August, then disappeared around the time I contacted the college to ask about it. A College of Charleston spokesman said that the school requested the removal because the quote made it seem like it was an either-or proposition. The best students still do get merit aid, he said.

So how does the school decide how much to award and to whom?

“There’s a limit to how much I think I can go into detail,” Jimmie Foster Jr., the vice president of enrollment planning at College of Charleston, said when I pressed the question in an interview. Better to keep that sort of thing out of the hands of competitors, after all. EAB hasn’t helped the school with financial aid optimization, so it couldn’t say either.

Whatever the pricing strategy, the financial results have been impressive. For out-of-state students in one recent year, the school offered three times the discount off the list price per student compared with what South Carolina students received while still extracting double the net price from those out-of-state students.

In the space of five years, the school has gone from having three outside states each send it 75 or more first-year students to nine outside states doing so.

According to the school’s 2024-25 common data set, the statistic-stuffed form that colleges and universities send to U.S. News & World Report and other such entities, 1,127 of the 1,249 students in the first-year class who could afford to pay the full price (including both in-state and out-of-state students), received grants. The average annual amount was $12,572.

In other words, College of Charleston has good reason to believe that the vast majority of its most affluent students wouldn’t come without a hefty discount.

A Slippery Slope

College of Charleston is not alone in giving scholarships to people who don’t need them.

It is, after all, the model Mr. Maguire helped pioneer at Boston College, a Jesuit university. Nobody looked over his shoulder back then questioning the ethics of big discounts for people who could afford full price, he told me last month.

He has never been silent about inequities in the system, though. In a 2003 interview in an industry journal, he suggested that Princeton, and the like, should hand over $100 million from its multibillion-dollar endowments to a college that has nothing and help it educate more struggling students.

That hasn’t happened. But he’s not alone in considering the fate of the applicants who have the least money.

Eileen K. O’Leary spent 34 years in the financial aid trenches at Stonehill College, outside of Boston, before retiring in 2017. There, she purchased consulting services from Mr. Zucker.

Over time, she felt a growing amount of pressure to offer bigger discounts to more people who didn’t need them. After all, there were usually competitors down the road with a different consultant whispering in their ears, urging them to cut the price further. Then, more families realized they could play schools against one another.

“I was old school, and I thought financial aid was for improving access, but it no longer was,” she said. “It was a business model.”

The Matchmaking App

If you’re a private equity firm, all of this looks a lot like a reason to invest in the consultancies.

After all, most colleges can’t afford to hire their own algorithm-twirling data scientists, and one quick way to draw scrutiny from your boss or your board is if enrollment and revenue decline. American University’s first-year class last fall came up 350 people short of the school’s goal of 2,250 students, contributing to a revenue gap that was over $20 million.

The fact that American is a reasonably selective school is a reminder of just how hard it is to win over students if you’re not one of the Ivy League schools that elected representatives seem so obsessed with. Hiring a name-brand enrollment consulting firm and keeping it on retainer to manage the data flow now feels more like defense than offense.

The private equity firms that own EAB and RNL will make money, or not, based on several factors, including what they paid initially to buy the companies and what they received in dividends (if anything) along the way.

But the big score comes when they eventually sell the companies.

As the college enrollment industry becomes ever more data-driven, you can watch EAB and RNL in real time billing themselves more like tech operators than some kind of direct-mail sweatshop. They possess “enrollment intelligence assets” that they deploy on “immense data sets” using “new capabilities to perform advanced analysis.”

Software companies come with larger valuations than consulting firms, after all.

In 2023, EAB introduced Appily, a consumer-facing college portal with a sunny vibe. At its heart, it’s matchmaking software. “Think about it as a dating app,” Tisleen Singh, an EAB director, said on a company podcast.

Students set up a profile or conduct a search, and schools can respond right away or invite people to virtual tours. They can also instantly offer admission — and a discount — without a formal application.

Swipe right and get a $50,000 merit aid award in no time flat! Appily does not actually match you with romantic prospects in your entering class though — at least not yet.

It’s a game effort, and EAB already claims three million Appily users. But neither EAB’s private equity owners nor RNL’s overlords have been able to sell their stakes, even though they have all been investors for several years. Some of them wouldn’t comment, and others didn’t reply to requests for comment.

You can understand why. With many universities under fire from the Trump administration, EAB and RNL salespeople have to work even harder to get schools to part with their money. One thing that may help: If international students are afraid to come to the United States — or are not allowed to — the colleges will need more firepower and data savvy to fight for any applicants who still want to pursue higher education.

None of this is Jack Maguire’s problem anymore. By 2022, he and his wife were ready to plan for retirement. They sold their company to Carnegie, a marketing-focused consultancy backed by New Heritage Capital, a private equity firm.

Mr. Maguire, a longtime American Legion baseball coach who has had five former players signed to professional contracts, still gets out and throws batting practice. The couple recently returned from a trip through all the British Isles.

And by last year, New Heritage was done with being an enrollment whisperer, too. Another investment firm, Shamrock Capital, is now the money behind the ongoing efforts to extract one more dollar from one last family each and every spring.

Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.