[ad_1]
Four more prestigious universities have agreed to settle a two-year federal class action lawsuit alleging they conspired to fix the amount of financial aid they provided to students.
Dartmouth College, Rice University, Northwestern University and Vanderbilt University will pay a total of $166 million to resolve claims against them, according to Friday’s court filing.
Dartmouth and Rice each agreed to pay $33.75 million. Vanderbilt paid $55 million, and Northwestern offered $43.5 million to settle the charges.
To date, 10 of the 17 defendant schools have agreed to settle the lawsuit, but continue to deny the details of the charges. The total settlement amount now stands at $284 million, of which cash payments will be made to affected undergraduate students. It is estimated that each student in the class will receive about $750 from the settlement, which still needs to be approved by a judge.
The seven universities remaining in the lawsuit are California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Notre Dame, and University of Pennsylvania.
The antitrust lawsuit was filed in Illinois federal court in 2022 by multiple law firms representing a group of students who previously attended some of the universities.
The plaintiffs alleged that the universities engaged in a price-fixing scheme by sharing methodologies for how much financial aid to award to prospective students. Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that the defendant universities “participated in a pricing cartel designed to reduce or eliminate financial aid as a competitive arena, reducing the net cost of attendance for students who actually received financial aid.” “It was artificially raised,” he said.
If true, it would violate Section 568 of the American School Improvement Act of 1994. The law states that universities can cooperate in developing financial aid formulas, but only if they do not take into account applicants’ financial needs in individual admissions decisions.
The lawsuit was filed against 17 members of the so-called 568 Presidents Group, which several years ago developed a “consensus methodology” for determining a family’s ability to pay for college. The group met at least once a year to discuss financial aid calculations, according to the complaint. The defendant universities are:
Brown University, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Rice Universities, Vanderbilt University, Yale University.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Ted Normand said in a statement: “These new settlements significantly increase the amount of compensation to class members for the harms we allege have been caused by the defendant cartels. ” he said.
follow me twitter.
[ad_2]
Source link
