Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology agreed to settle in a federal antitrust lawsuit that alleges 17 wealthy institutions, known as the 568 Presidents Group, illegally colluded on financial aid formulas and overcharged students for years.
Late Friday, JHU settled for $18.5 million and Caltech for $16.7 million, according to court filings. Both were more recent additions to the group, which was established in 1998. Johns Hopkins joined in November 2021, and Caltech in 2019.
The class action lawsuit was filed in January 2022 and initially implicated Caltech along with 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 lawsuit in March 2022.
After Friday’s court filing, 12 of the 17 institutions have settled. Altogether the settlement amounts add up to nearly $320 million. Vanderbilt had the largest settlement: $55 million.
The five remaining defendants in the lawsuit—Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame and Penn—have denied wrongdoing and continue to fight the antitrust case in court. The 568 Presidents Group name is a reference to a carve-out in federal law that allowed member institutions to discuss financial aid formulas with immunity from federal antitrust laws due to their need-blind status. Congress created that exemption following a 1991 price-fixing scandal that involved all eight Ivy League universities and MIT.
The legislative carve-out expired in 2022, and the group subsequently dissolved.
However, plaintiffs have argued that defendants did consider financial circumstances and made decisions based on family wealth and donation history or capacity, often admitting students on “special interest lists” with substandard transcripts compared to the rest of accepted classes.
