A group of former students recently filed a lawsuit against 32 universities and two college admission organizations for allegedly “inflating the price of attendance” through early admissions.
The lawsuit states that while early admission boosts a student’s chance of acceptance, it requires them to withdraw other applications and “pay whatever tuition and fees the school demands of them.”
Edward Diver, an attorney representing the students, told The College Fix the group filed the lawsuit “primarily to end the broken status-quo represented by binding Early Decision.”
“We hope that our lawsuit puts an end to the anticompetitive practices alleged in our complaint,” he said.
The lawsuit accuses universities including Brown, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Barnard, Columbia, and Duke of “participating in practices that entrench patterns of inequality of access while inflating the price of attendance.”
It also claims the schools agreed not to compete for students admitted through early decision, which raises tuition and fees while reinforcing “a system widely acknowledged to be unfair and harmful.”