A couple quick legal observations:
(1) This complaint alleges a class action. The alleged class would be made up of all the people who enrolled in the relevant programs, during the respective relevant periods, and received need-based aid, but not enough to cover all the costs they paid to the relevant defendant (so, basically not enough aid to cover all of tuition, fees, room, and board).
(2) Damages in a civil antitrust cases are necessarily speculative in some sense. The question is usually some form of how much lower would the price paid have been if not for the illegal activity. This is necessarily a hypothetical, as of course the illegal activity happened in the actual world. That hypothetical world is often known as the “but-for world” (meaning world that would have happened but for the illegal activity).
Courts long ago decided the federal right to bring private antitrust suits would be meaningless if plaintiffs were not given a practical opportunity to prove such damages to the civil standard of proof (preponderance of the evidence). To do that, they usually offer some sort of expert testimony, supported by the documented facts and testimony in the case. The damages experts typically build some sort of economic model, where the illegal activity is a variable in the model, and then they run the model with that variable turned off during the relevant period.
That process generates the hypothetical “but for” price which can be compared to the actual price during that period, and the difference is the measure of damages. And of course the defense will have experts that dispute all that, and that is one of the critical trial issues.
Again, without being able to do something like that, it would be impossible for private rights of action under the antitrust laws to exist. And that right is specifically in federal law.
(3) This is a very advanced legal topic, but briefly, there is a critical intersection between these first two issues. For an antitrust action to be certified as a class action, the plaintiffs will need to show there is sufficient commonality as to how they were damaged. If damages are too individualized, then they can bring individual cases but not a class action.
So even before trial, there will very likely be a battle of the experts over that issue. But as these things usually go, the fact these institutions were (allegedly) using something they developed called the Consensus Methodology to inform their sophisticated internal financial aid models is going to help the plaintiffs. If that is true, it implies that there will be identifiable effects for each college using its basic model but assuming the Consensus Methodology was not applicable. And so it is at least plausible (not proven) the plaintiffs will be able to certify a class.
For more, the Court’s opinion denying the defendants’ motions to dismiss is here. On such a motion, the Court assumes the plaintiffs’ factual allegations are true, and determines whether if true, they would have a legally-sufficient claim:
But a relevant passage:
The plaintiffs’ allegations are not too speculative to support an antitrust injury or antitrust standing. The amended complaint alleges that the claimed conspiracy decreased competition in the relevant market by allowing the defendants to work together to provide the same aid awards. Am. Compl. ¶ 234. Without the conspiracy, the plaintiffs allege, the defendants would have competed for students by providing more competitive aid packages. Id. ¶ 237. This is supported by evidence cited in the amended complaint from Yale and Harvard that suggests that these schools left or declined to join the 568 Group because they concluded that doing so would hinder their ability to provide larger aid awards. Id. ¶¶ 123–25. For these reasons, the Court overrules the defendants’ arguments concerning antitrust injury and antitrust standing.
Again, that doesn’t mean the plaintiffs have won. It just means antitrust law allows for such a case, and now they have to prove it.