Eui Young Kim

On Monday night, Yale, along with dozens of other private universities and the College Board, was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit for an alleged pricing conspiracy. 

The law firm Hagens Berman is investigating Yale, dozens of other private universities and the College Board for colluding to artificially lower financial aid for college students with noncustodial parents, which is any parent whose child does not live with them the majority of the time. Other institutions implicated in the price-fixing lawsuit include peer universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Stanford. 

The firm’s investigation claims to have found evidence that the College Board, an organization that administers college aptitude testing and a financial aid application form, may implement unjust guidelines for students with noncustodial parents. This alleged anticompetitive conduct may have decreased students’ chances of qualifying for additional need-based financial aid from colleges and universities.

The lawsuit alleges that the price-fixing strategy among the implicated institutions raised the cost of college by approximately $6,200, affecting those from divorced or separated families. The antitrust lawsuit seeks over $5 million in compensation for monetary damages.

The University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The complaint, filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, Maxwell Hansen and Eileen Chang, Boston University student and Cornell University alum, respectively, reads that “defendants have engaged in concerted action to require a noncustodial parent of any applicant seeking non-federal financial aid to provide financial information.” This “concerted action substantially raised the prices that Plaintiffs and Class members pay to attend college.”

Furthermore, the complaint alleges that “each Defendant has recruited, accepted, enrolled, and charged artificially high net prices of attendance to, and thus injured, individuals residing within this District.”

The College Board is accused of pushing schools to consider the income and assets of noncustodial parents when making financial aid determinations with rules that require all applicants seeking financial aid to submit a College Scholarship Service — or CSS — Profile, a form overseen by the College Board.

In the CSS Profile, all noncustodial parents, regardless of their involvement in a student’s education, must provide information about their income and assets. The suit alleges that the College Board pushed for universities to consider this information when making financial aid decisions.

The lawsuit also posits that Harvard’s director of financial aid served as a chair of the College Board, and their current chair of the Financial Assistance Assembly Council works at Columbia University. 

In an email to the News, Holly Stepp, College Board’s executive director of external communications and media relations, wrote that “College Board has just received this legal action and are reviewing it, but we are confident that we will prevail in this action.” 

The plaintiffs hope to attain damages from the universities for those impacted and to change the financial aid process for future students.

This is not Yale’s first antitrust charge in conjunction with financial aid. 

In 2022, Yale was accused of practicing need-conscious admissions, which would violate antitrust law in its collaboration with other schools to determine financial aid formulas.

The University spokesperson previously wrote to the News, “Yale’s financial aid policy is 100% compliant with all applicable laws.” 

In 2024, Yale agreed to pay $18.5 million in settlement of the antitrust lawsuit, although the University spokesperson wrote that “this settlement contains no admission that Yale did anything wrong but allows the university to avoid the cost and disruption of further litigation and to continue its work in making undergraduate education more affordable for more families.”

The Yale Undergraduate Financial Aid Office is located at 246 Church St.