What’s New
Four current and former college students have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that 32 highly selective private institutions’ use of early decision in admissions violates federal antitrust law.
The complaint, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, asserts that the institutions engage in practices that “entrench patterns of inequality of access while inflating the price of attendance.” The plaintiffs claim that colleges’ collective enforcement of early-decision programs are a “horizontal agreement to reduce or eliminate competition.”
The lawsuit names some of the nation’s most prominent institutions, including Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Vanderbilt University, and Williams College. It also names the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, or COFHE, a group of highly selective private colleges that share data on admissions, financial aid, and costs; the Common Application, Inc., which operates the widely used admissions platform; and Scoir, Inc., which runs a shared admissions platform called the Coalition App.
The Details
Students applying for early decision, known as ED, at a given college agree to attend if admitted, at which point they’re expected to promptly withdraw any applications to other institutions. Critics have long contended that ED tends to benefit wealthier applicants because it takes away a student’s ability to compare financial-aid offers from multiple colleges.
It’s worth remembering, though, that many highly selective colleges with ED programs provide substantial financial aid to families with significant financial need. That’s why some college-access experts say applying early can benefit high-achieving, low-income students who, if admitted, often receive more generous financial-aid offers than they would get during the regular-decision process.
Many private institutions with low acceptance rates admit a large share of their freshman class through ED — an incentive to apply early. Though ED agreements aren’t legally enforceable, they’re often described as “binding” commitments. Both the Common App and the Coalition App require early-decision applicants to sign a document stating they will enroll if admitted, except in cases of financial hardship or if their aid offer makes attendance impossible.
The plaintiffs allege that the named institutions “facilitate and enforce … anticompetitive restraints,” in part by sharing the names of early-decision admits with other institutions, which the lawsuit describes as a coordinated agreement not to recruit or admit students accepted under another institution’s ED program. The practice harms students, the complaint says, by preventing competition for a subgroup of applicants “in order to increase overall tuition levels and to decrease financial aid, thereby increasing the net price of attending” a college that uses ED.
“Early-decision applicants lose choice and negotiation leverage, while regular-decision applicants are left to scramble for an artificially diminished number of admission slots doled out at lower acceptance rates,” Benjamin D. Brown, co-chair of the antitrust practice and managing partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, who represents the plaintiffs, wrote in a statement. “We contend that all of this is only made possible by an agreement not to compete that violates bedrock antitrust law.”
The plaintiffs seek an injunction to end the use of early-decision programs, as well as past damages for students admitted via early decision who were allegedly forced to pay more than they would have otherwise.
The Common Application and Scoir declined to comment on the lawsuit. COFHE and several colleges named in the complaint did not immediately respond to emails sent early Friday afternoon.
The Backdrop
The lawsuit comes at a time of growing scrutiny of admissions practices at highly selective colleges. On Thursday, President Trump signed a memorandum forcing all institutions participating in federal-aid programs to submit detailed data on applicants and admitted students to “verify” that they’re not unlawfully considering race in their admissions processes.
In 2022, a group of plaintiffs filed a class-action antitrust lawsuit against 17 private colleges, alleging that the institutions had violated federal law by conspiring to artificially reduce students’ financial-aid offers and increase the net cost of attendance by using a common methodology for assessing financial need. All but five of those colleges have since settled for a total of more than $300 million without admitting any wrongdoing.
The lawsuit filed on Friday could have a similar impact — or amount to a mere nuisance for big-name colleges.
