On Monday, a lawsuit filed in Federal Court accused sixteen of the nation’s leading private universities & colleges of conspiring to reduce the financial aid they award to admitted students through a price-fixing cartel.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal Court in Chicago on behalf of 5 former undergraduates who attended some of the universities named in the suit, takes aim at a decades-old antitrust exemption granted to these universities for financial aid decisions & claims that the colleges have overcharged an estimated 1,70,000 students who were eligible for financial aid over nearly 2 decades.
The universities accused of wrongdoing are Brown, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgeled “need-blind.” The group’s name is derived from a section of federal law permitting such collaborations: Section 568 of the Higher Education Act.
The suit claims 9 of the schools aren't actually need-blind because, for many years, they have found ways to consider some applicants’ ability to pay. The lawsuit claims that the actions of these nine schools — Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, MIT, Northwestern, Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania & Vanderbilt — render the actions of all sixteen universities unlawful, turning it into what the suit calls “the 568 Cartel.”
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