Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology have agreed to settle a federal antitrust lawsuit that alleges 17 wealthy institutions, known as the 568 Presidents Group, illegally colluded in financial aid formulas and overcharged students over the years.
Last Friday, JHU paid $18.5 million and Caltech paid $16.7 million, according to court filings. Both are recent additions to the group, which was founded in 1998. Johns Hopkins joined in November 2021, and Caltech in 2019.
The class action lawsuit was filed in January 2022 and initially affected Caltech and Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale Universities; Dartmouth College; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Universities of Chicago, Notre Dame and Pennsylvania.
Johns Hopkins was added to the case in March 2022.
After the application was filed in court on Friday, 12 of the 17 institutions have settled. In total the settlement amounts to about $320 million. Vanderbilt had the largest settlement: $55 million.
The five remaining defendants in the case—Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame and Penn—have denied wrongdoing and continue to fight the antitrust charges in court. The name of the 568 Presidents Group is a reference to a written text in federal law that allowed member institutions to negotiate a financial aid formula with immunity from federal antitrust laws due to their discretionary status. Congress created that exemption following the 1991 price-fixing scandal that involved all eight Ivy League universities and MIT.
The legal carve-out expired in 2022, and the group was disbanded.
However, the plaintiffs have asserted that the defendants considered financial circumstances and made decisions based on family wealth and contribution history or volume, often admitting students to a “special interest list” with substandard transcripts compared to other accepted classes.
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