Five of America’s most elite universities will pay over $104.5 million to settle claims they conspired to limit students’ financial aid.
The universities — Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory, and Yale — were five of 17 institutions subject to a 2022 class-action lawsuit brought by eight former students claiming they were part of a “price-fixing cartel” that used a shared methodology to calculate financial need in a way that intentionally reduced aid for students from working- and middle-class families.
To settle the case, Columbia and Duke agreed to pay $24 million each, Yale and Emory will pay $18.5 million each, and Brown will pay $19.5 million — although the schools deny the charges against them. The University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, and Rice University already settled the suit. The remaining nine institutions involved in the lawsuit are Georgetown, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Cornell, Dartmouth, UPenn, MIT, and the University of Notre Dame.
The 17 colleges and universities named in the suit were part of the 568 Presidents Group, an association of elite institutions that collaborated on aid formulas. The plaintiffs’ attorneys estimate that roughly 200,000 students were affected by the ‘price-fixing’ practices over two decades.
