For almost a quarter of a century, a coterie of the nation’s most elite universities had a legal shield: They would be exempt from federal antitrust laws when they shared formulas to measure prospective students’ financial needs.
But the provision included a crucial requirement: that the cooperating universities’ admissions processes be “need-blind,” meaning they could not factor in whether a prospective student was wealthy enough to pay.
A court filing on Tuesday night revealed that five of those universities—Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale—have collectively agreed to pay $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of, in fact, weighing financial ability when they deliberated over the fates of some applicants.
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