Two more schools settle in an ongoing suit implicating Penn in the violation of antitrust laws related to financial aid.
Photo Credit: Jennifer Mesa
By Emma McClure
During the Spring 2024 semester, financial aid recipients at Penn and other major universities, including Yale, Columbia, and MIT, received notice of a proposed settlement in a class action lawsuit against their institutions for violation of antitrust laws that resulted in unfairly low financial aid awards. Ten universities pooled together a settlement totaling $289 million, and two more universities proposed sizable settlements on February 24th, 2025. However, Penn has yet to propose a settlement in the case.
Henry et. al v. Brown University et. al, implicates the following universities: Brown University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.
Of these universities, 10 have already settled, with each paying between $13.5 million (University of Chicago) and $55 million (Vanderbilt University). Caltech and Johns Hopkins have now proposed a settlement totalling an additional $32.5 million.
From 1998 through 2020, Penn was a member of the “568 Cartel,” a group of American universities with need-blind admissions protocols. The group was created following an antitrust exemption carved out for need blind schools allowing them to collude on their financial aid award process. Penn, along with other member universities, began implementing the group’s Consensus Methodology in 2003—the set of practices the group established for making financial aid offers.
Although Penn’s financial aid website states that domestic admissions are need blind, the lawsuit identifies Penn as one of the universities that allegedly favored wealthy applicants when admitting students from the waitlist and held space for the children of donors.
The deadline to submit a claim for the first settlement expired on December 17th, 2024, but Penn students will also be eligible to submit claims for the Caltech and Johns Hopkins settlement and any other settlements to follow.
Separately, Penn and several of the other universities implicated in Henry et. al v. Brown University et. al were sued in a class action alleging price fixing to artificially lower financial aid given to students with noncustodial parents.
Emma McClure is a sophomore in the College studying Criminology with minors in Legal Studies and History and Political Science. She is also the editor of The Social Ivy. Her email is efmcc@sas.upenn.edu.
