Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale are the five schools that have agreed to pay $104.5 million in a case arguing that they were not actually need-blind when making their admissions decisions. Below is a gift link to the article:
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Seems to be specific to wait list admission decisions, at least at some of the schools. The lawsuit claimed that the antitrust exemption that these schools had did not allow any need awareness.
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Hmmm, I wonder what part of their budget that money will come out of.
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Seven more schools have filed settlement agreements. Looks like Rice is paying the most so far ($33.7M), which is interesting. Total settlement amount stands at around $151M. Nine of the seventeen schools initially charged have not yet settled.
From Inside Higher Ed. Free registration allows one to read 5 articles per month.
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It’s more than just waitlist though. Schools may know financials of recruited athletes and Questbridge, Posse or other students coming thru college access partnerships. Not to mention how many tells there are (which don’t directly give visibility to financials) in the app, especially for schools that use CollegeBoard’s Landscape.
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It’s good that these programs are being caught and held accountable.
However, these fees are going to be rolled right into future tuition increases, fees, etc. The school’s name will be in the headline, but the students/parents will essentially pay the fine.
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My D attended one of those schools, and our middle class family benefited tremendously from the financial aid she received. It cost a lot less to send her there than it would have cost to send her to our very well regarded state flagship. Only a single data point, of course, but she was helped, not hurt, in terms of the financial aid at this school.
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Some of these schools (Yale) really did not need to care about the financials. I do wish they would be honest in saying what they are doing. The lies and opaqueness in admissions destroy trust.
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Wow. They’re really going to have to figure that out because a lot of need blind schools switch to need aware during WL. The ones I’ve seen are open about this however (e.g. Barnard) so it’s not like they were trying to hide it.
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The suit targets the former members of the Presidents 568 Group, which received anti-trust exemptions so that they could share info about financial aid formulas to maximize aid. So there’s no liability for schools outside that group (whose membership varied over the years but still included a relatively small number of total schools). But of course the PR impact could drive some schools that aren’t directly affected to change their practices.
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Here are a couple of quotes from the NY Times article:
Ultimately, the suit claimed, about 200,000 students over about two decades were overcharged because the 568 Group had eliminated competition on cost, leaving the net price of attendance “artificially inflated.”
So I guess by being need-aware on the waitlist, they got artificially high prices from the full-pay families.
The lawyers added that they had “pursued a strategy of increasing the settlement amounts with each successive agreement or set of agreements to exert pressure on non-settling defendants to reach agreement imminently or risk having to pay significantly more by waiting.”
These are the ones that have settled or indicated they’re going to settle:
- U. of Chicago: $13.5M
- Emory & Yale: $18.5M each
- Brown: $19.5M
- Columbia & Duke: $24M each
- Rice: $34M
- Vanderbilt has indicated that it plans to settle.
Other schools, including Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania, remain mired in the litigation, with no trial date set.
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Like I said on the UChicago thread…they were so smart to be the first to settle. The other schools have probably each paid at least $13.5M in attorney fees in the last 6 months 
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It says " antitrust shield expired in 2022, and the 568 Group has disbanded." So does this mean they are under no obligation post 2022 to be need blind?
There are a number of different allegations in the complaint which survived a motion to dismiss, triggering this wave of settlements. The waitlist allegation was pretty straightforward but there were others.
The actual alleged injuries were not from being need aware, it was from colluding on their need-based aid formulas, which is a form of price-fixing in antitrust law. But there was a statutory exemption (since expired) for need blind colleges. But if they were not actually need blind, then their collusion on aid formulas was illegal.
In terms of who was harmed by that collusion on aid formulas, it could really be anyone who got less than full grant aid (including when they got work study or loans instead of grants), through anyone who got nothing but was close enough they might have gotten something with a different formula.
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So as long as they were not colluding on aid formulas, they could be need aware even before–and some defendants actually left the group prior to the expiration.
Now that the statutory antitrust exemption has expired, no one can collude on aid formulas no matter what. So they are free to be need aware openly, but they could always have been if they had not been colluding on aid formulas.
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And it’s worth remembering that for most of these universities, need-blind status preceded the invention of the 568 group; the 568 group emerged because the need-blind universities thought they’d be able to provide better aid if they could discuss best practices, learn lessons, etc., and sought anti-trust exemption to do it, which was granted in the mid-90s (I believe).
None of these schools stopped being need blind when the anti-trust exemption expired in 2022. They just stopped being able to talk about their FA practices. And the vast majority of these schools will remain need-blind in the future, for PR/brand purposes and because they have the resources to do it.
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Here’s more info on the 568 Group, including links to archived pages from the 568 group website which was completely erased (yet lives on in the Wayback Machine).
Nice windfall. Maybe now these lawyers could donate a bunch of buildings.
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Yes, excellent point.
This leads to another point, which is going forward, it is still going to be a question what a college actually means when they say they are need blind.
There was no allegation that any defendant had Admissions directly looking at individual ability to pay for domestic applicants to their traditional college divisions when making early or regular decisions, so presumably it still means at least they won’t do that.
But outside of that carefully-defined box–who knows? Will they look at ability to pay for waitlist decisions, non-traditional colleges, and internationals? Will they use complex admissions formulas and criteria, including yield models and budget tracking models, that de facto favor low and no need applicants without Admissions ever doing it directly? All while still claiming to be need blind?
That would be some sort of truth in advertising issue, not the issue in this lawsuit, and so it remains unresolved legally.
None of those are “need” in a narrow sense, even though they are (sometimes very strong) correlates of “need” or lack thereof.
Indeed, since almost any college admission criterion has some correlation to “need” or lack thereof (including grades and test scores), if you consider use of such correlates to “need” as being “need aware”, then all colleges other than open admission ones are “need aware”.