Top Major Schools Illegally Collude to Limit Student Financial Aid, Lawsuit Says

From the text of the complaint:

> The 568 Exemption allowed the [colleges in question] to eliminate incentives to compete if all of the members admitted all students on a need-blind basis. Plaintiffs show herein, however, that by their own actions, Defendants did not satisfy this provision and thus were not entitled to the exemption.

This seems to be the heart of the complaint. The admissions process wasn't actually need-blind, so the colleges don't have an exemption from laws against price-fixing.

Starting at page 26 (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.41...) they list a number of ways that colleges, despite claiming to be need-blind, actually do take financial need into account in admissions decisions. That's the real reason this scheme is illegal.

One (small) part of the reason they aren't need-blind turns out to be that they decide where and how to recruit students using sophisticated models that try to predict the resulting demand for financial aid (see pp. 29-32). Essentially, they are able to use data to shape their applicant pool based on financial need, while still technically being "need-blind" when reviewing the applications that come in.

But there are other issues too, such as the use of need-aware policies for waitlisted applicants and the advantages given to "legacy" students.

It's very irritating when news articles talk about a complaint or opinion without linking to it.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.41...

The crux of the claim is that the schools "overcharged" students by admitting students who could afford to pay more, instead of rejecting those students and admitting different, poorer students. So the only people actually harmed are students who did NOT attend these schools, and paid more at a different school. That's not who the plaintiffs are.

Essentially, wealthy students (who were admitted!) are claiming that they could have gotten better aid packages if the schools set prices based on something other than need, and competed for the value those students brought to the school. Since the schools allegedly endeavor to hit a target total revenue, while charging less in tuition than the cost of providing the education, the plaintiffs wanted poorer student to pay more so they could pay less.

Smells like entitled wealthy people.

The claim that they're doing so to "limit student financial aid" doesn't make sense: how are they going to raise tuition and fees to $100K/year without increasing student loans?

Wow, there is a potentially a lot of money at stake here. It looks like I could be eligible to join this lawsuit if it goes forward.

>...[allege] the universities engaged in price fixing and unfairly limited aid by using a shared methodology to calculate applicants’ financial need.

This seems like the optimal way to run things though. In our current world where everything is "racist" and "sexist", how else can these entities shield themselves from lawsuit apart from sharing their methodologies? It seems like these entities were set up to fail from the beginning under these backwards rules.