Lawsuit says elite schools schemed to reduce financial aid for students.

[ShazzieB]

A class-action lawsuit claims a group of college presidents set up admissions policies that limited options for needy students and shrank their aid packages at top schools.

A “cartel” of elite universities that includes Northwestern, University of Chicago and Notre Dame conspired to restrict financial aid for needy students, a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago claims.

The three Chicago-area schools have been sued alongside colleges such as MIT, Duke and Yale as members of a group of top universities that shared information about students and set up joint rules to determine the financial need of students. Such information sharing is allowed if the schools involved agree to exclusively “need-blind” admissions policies— meaning students are admitted based only on their merits, not their family’s finances.

But the lawsuit cites public statements by officials at Northwestern and Notre Dame and other schools in the organization, called the 568 Presidents Group, which show that the schools do consider if prospective students can pay full freight for tuition, and especially whether their parents are wealthy or influential enough to make large donations.

*snip*

“These elite institutions occupy a place of privilege and importance in American society,” the lawsuit states. “And yet these same defendants, by their own admission, have participated in a price-fixing cartel that is designed to reduce or eliminate financial aid as a locus of competition, and that in fact has artificially inflated the net price of attendance for students receiving financial aid.”

The lawsuit seeks payouts for a pool of as many as 170,000 students who attended the schools and received financial aid since 2003, when the 568 Group created its formula for determining financial need.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2022/1/10/22876831/financial-aid-lawsuit-northwestern-notre-dame-university-chicago