The lawsuit that this article references is being discussed in this thread:
So far, ten schools have settled (with the first at $13.5M, the most recent at $55M) and there are still six holdouts. @NiceUnparticularMan has also been shedding some light today on some of the strategies that are often used in class action lawsuits in that thread.
The lawsuit is not because there are schools that give an admissions boost to donors’ kids. It’s that THESE schools got an exemption from the government to work together on their financial aid formulas and that 1) in exchange these schools were supposed to be need-blind in their admissions, i.e. agreeing not to give admissions preferment based on $, and 2) that the financial aid formulas were designed to keep net prices artificially higher than they might have otherwise been.
Schools that were not part of the exemption (like Harvard) could continue to give donors’ kids preferences with no legal issues. The issue is only with these 16 schools who agreed to be need-blind in exchange for an anti-trust exemption.