Yale, MIT Sued for Colluding to Limit Financial Aid Packages
- Columbia, Duke, Northwestern, Caltech also among defendants
- Proposed class action antitrust suit cites “common formula”
Yale items for sale at a store near the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut.
Photographer: Craig Warga/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
More than a dozen top U.S. colleges including Yale, Columbia and MIT were sued for allegedly conspiring to manipulate the admissions system to hold down financial aid for students and benefit wealthy applicants.
The proposed antitrust class action lawsuit, filed Sunday in federal court in Chicago, accuses the university “cartel” of a long-running scheme to collectively adopt “a common formula for determining an applicant’s ability to pay” tuition, rather than competing freely over financial aid by trying to attract students through more generous aid offers.