University administrators at a network of elite colleges across the U.S. have worked together to form a “cartel” that, as a group, drove up the cost of admissions and excluded financial aid students since at least 2003, a new lawsuit alleges. Among the schools accused of participating in the alleged...
The plaintiffs in the suit are Sia Henry, Michael Maerlander, Brandon Piyevsky, Kara Saffrin and Brittany Tatiana Weaver, all former students at one of the defendant schools.
The lawsuit boils down to a dispute over whether the network of schools take the financial position of their applicants into account when assessing applications. The lawsuit alleges, however, that the network didn’t just leave out students who needed financial aid; they allegedly developed a formula for determining whether applicants could pay full price or not, and used that same formula to assess applicants at each school.
“In critical respects, elite, private universities like Defendants are gatekeepers to the American Dream,” lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote. “[The schools’] misconduct is therefore particularly egregious because it has narrowed a critical pathway to upward mobility that admission to their institutions represents,” court documents said.