Johns Hopkins College and the California Institute of Know-how agreed to settle in a federal antitrust lawsuit that alleges 17 rich establishments, generally known as the 568 Presidents Group, illegally colluded on monetary help formulation and overcharged college students for years.
Late Friday, JHU settled for $18.5 million and Caltech for $16.7 million, based on courtroom filings. Each had been more moderen additions to the group, which was established in 1998. Johns Hopkins joined in November 2021, and Caltech in 2019.
The class motion lawsuit was filed in January 2022 and initially implicated Caltech together with Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale Universities; Dartmouth School; the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how; and the Universities of Chicago, Notre Dame and Pennsylvania.
Johns Hopkins was added to the lawsuit in March 2022.
After Friday’s courtroom submitting, 12 of the 17 establishments have settled. Altogether the settlement quantities add as much as practically $320 million. Vanderbilt had the biggest settlement: $55 million.
The 5 remaining defendants within the lawsuit—Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame and Penn—have denied wrongdoing and proceed to combat the antitrust case in courtroom. The 568 Presidents Group title is a reference to a carve-out in federal legislation that allowed member establishments to debate monetary help formulation with immunity from federal antitrust legal guidelines as a consequence of their need-blind standing. Congress created that exemption following a 1991 price-fixing scandal that concerned all eight Ivy League universities and MIT.
The legislative carve-out expired in 2022, and the group subsequently dissolved.
Nevertheless, plaintiffs have argued that defendants did take into account monetary circumstances and made selections based mostly on household wealth and donation historical past or capability, usually admitting college students on “particular curiosity lists” with substandard transcripts in comparison with the remainder of accepted courses.
