University of Chicago agrees to pay $13.5 million to students after being accused of participating in a ‘price-fixing cartel’ with other prestigious schools to limit financial aid

From Business Insider:

The University of Chicago became the first of 16 top schools to settle claims it engaged in a scheme to keep financial aid packages low.

In January 2022, five former undergraduate students who attended Duke, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt filed a lawsuit against 16 schools including UChicago, Brown, Yale, and Northwestern. The suit targeted a group called the 568 Presidents Group, which allowed schools to work together to determine common standards for disbursing financial aid.

Through that group, the lawsuit accused the schools of having “participated in a price-fixing cartel that is designed to reduce or eliminate financial aid as a locus of competition, and that in fact has artificially inflated the net price of attendance for students receiving financial aid,” per the original legal filing. The plaintiffs said the schools favored wealthy applicants and “conspired” to reduce financial aid packages, and that they “overcharged over 170,000 financial-aid recipients by at least hundreds of millions of dollars.”