Five elite universities settle price-fixing lawsuit
- 17 universities have been sued and eight total have settled
- The schools are accused of considering financial need in admissions
- That violates an agreement to exempt them from antitrust laws
FILE PHOTO: Old Campus at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, November 28, 2012. REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin/File Photo
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(NewsNation) — Five elite schools have agreed to pay $104.5 million to settle a price-fixing lawsuit centered around admissions and financial aid.
Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale universities all agreed to settle in the lawsuit. Columbia and Duke will each pay $24 million each, Brown will pay $19.5 million and Emory and Yale will pay $18.5 million each.
“The University maintains that the claims have no merit but determined that ongoing litigation would divert significant resources from Brown’s focus on its core priorities,” the university said in a statement. “Brown denies these allegations and has agreed to resolve the litigation on the express condition that the settlement includes no admission of wrongdoing.”
The schools were exempted from anti-trust laws to allow them to share the formula they used to determine the financial needs of students. But there was a condition, that the universities make sure their admissions process was need-blind.
A class-action lawsuit accused 17 top universities of violating that provision by weighing students’ ability to pay, including favoring children of donors when admitting students from weight lists.
The plaintiffs argue the actions artificially inflated prices for students receiving financial aid for years.
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Illinois in 2022. The University of Chicago, Rice University and Vanderbilt University previously settled.
With the recent settlement, a total of eight schools have opted to settle while the rest are continuing to fight the suit.
California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania are all still engaged in battling the accusations.
The money will be distributed among all students in the settlement class, not just those who attended the universities that settled. That class consists of around 200,000 students going back around 20 years.
The schools asked that any leftover funds be given to charitable causes that help disadvantaged students access higher education.
The settlement still has to be approved by the judge.