NEW YORK, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- A filing in an antitrust lawsuit against some of the nation's top universities alleges the schools overcharged students by 685 million U.S. dollars in a "price-fixing" scheme, raising serious questions about their past admission and financial aid policies, reported The Washington Post on Tuesday.
"Documents and testimony from officials at Georgetown, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and other elite schools suggest they appeared to favor wealthy applicants despite their stated policy of accepting students without regard for their financial circumstances," noted the report.
That "need-blind" policy allowed the schools to collaborate on financial aid under federal law, but plaintiffs in the case say the colleges violated the statute by considering students' family income, it said.
Former students accuse 17 elite schools, including most of the Ivy League, of colluding to limit the financial aid packages of working- and middle-class students. The claimed damages of 685 million dollars, which were detailed in the court filing Monday night, would automatically triple to more than 2 billion dollars under U.S. antitrust laws.
The universities named in the suit have denied wrongdoing and sought to have the case dismissed. They say they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on financial aid for students, and some have recently dramatically expanded their support for low-income and middle-class students.
