Early Decision Antitrust Lawsuit Against Elite Colleges

The early decision antitrust lawsuit against elite colleges is a proposed class action, D’Amico v. Consortium on Financing Higher Education, filed August 8, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. It accuses 32 highly selective colleges, along with the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), the Common Application Inc., and Scoir Inc., of conspiring to use binding early decision admissions to suppress financial aid and inflate what students pay. The defendant schools have moved to dismiss the case, and oral arguments on that motion were scheduled for May 1, 2026.¹²

The Core Allegation

The complaint frames binding early decision as a “horizontal agreement between competing schools not to compete.” Under early decision, a student applies to only one school, and if admitted, must withdraw every other application before ever seeing a financial aid package or comparing offers. The plaintiffs argue that this structure removes the competitive pressure that would otherwise push schools to offer generous aid, and that the coordinated use of that structure across 32 elite institutions is itself the restraint.¹

The complaint also alleges that colleges present early decision agreements as legally binding when they know the agreements are not enforceable in court. Students and families are told they cannot walk away; schools, meanwhile, reserve the right to change tuition or rescind admission for grades or conduct. The plaintiffs call this a false sense of obligation that keeps students from bargaining.³

The legal theory rests on Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits agreements among competitors that restrain trade. The plaintiffs characterize coordinated binding early decision as a per se antitrust violation, meaning a court should not need to weigh procompetitive justifications before finding it illegal.⁴

Who Is Being Sued

The lawsuit names 32 colleges and universities, all identified as current or former members of COFHE, plus three organizational defendants.⁵

Ivy League: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania
Other research universities: Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, University of Chicago, University of Rochester, Vanderbilt, Washington University in St. Louis
Liberal arts colleges: Amherst, Barnard, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, Macalester, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Pomona, Smith, Swarthmore, Trinity, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams

COFHE itself, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an unincorporated organization of highly selective private colleges founded in the mid-1970s. Its stated mission was research and policy analysis on financial aid, but the complaint alleges it also facilitated the sharing of admissions and financial aid information, including lists of students admitted through early decision, that let member schools coordinate practices. COFHE officially closed on December 31, 2025 after its membership voted to end operations.⁶

The Common Application Inc. and Scoir Inc., which operates the Coalition Application, are the two major application platforms named. The plaintiffs allege the platforms enforce the single-ED-application restriction by permitting only one binding submission and requiring signatures from the student, a parent, and a school counselor. Schools then use platform information to identify students already admitted through early decision elsewhere and drop them from their own pools.³ Neither platform had issued a public response as of the available reporting.

Notably, several elite schools that use early decision or early action programs are not defendants, including Harvard, Yale, and MIT.²

The Plaintiffs and the Proposed Class

The four named plaintiffs are Alayna D’Amico, Max Miller, Bella Robinson, and Bram Silbert, current and former students at schools including Wesleyan and Vassar. They are represented by the antitrust firms Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Langer Grogan & Diver, led by Benjamin Brown and Edward Diver.¹

D’Amico, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, applied to Wesleyan through early decision in the fall of 2018, enrolled in fall 2019, and graduated in May 2023. She alleges she paid the full cost of attendance every semester because the binding admission left her no way to compare or negotiate aid elsewhere.⁵

The proposed class covers all students who enrolled as full-time undergraduates at any of the 32 defendant schools within the four years before the complaint was filed and who paid tuition not fully covered by grants. That includes both ED admits who got some grant aid and any-track admits who received no grant aid at all. The complaint estimates the class at “tens of thousands of members, at minimum.”³

The plaintiffs are seeking three things: an injunction permanently barring the defendant schools from using binding early decision, monetary damages for students who were overcharged, and structural reforms to how the schools run admissions and deliver aid.¹

Why Early Decision Is the Target

Early decision is offered mainly by private universities and selective liberal arts colleges. A student applies to a single school by a November deadline, with signatures from the student, a parent, and a school counselor affirming the commitment. If admitted, the student withdraws all other applications and submits an enrollment deposit.⁷

The admissions boost is substantial. One study cited by Brookings found that equally qualified early decision applicants have a 20% to 30% higher chance of acceptance than regular-decision applicants.⁸ At Duke, the ED acceptance rate for the class of 2028 was 12.9%, compared to 4.1% for regular decision.⁷ Schools have been filling more of their classes this way: across 66 selective colleges, the average share of freshmen enrolled through ED rose from 38% to 54% between 2015–16 and 2024–25.

The friction with financial aid is straightforward. Aid letters sometimes arrive well after acceptance, by which point other application deadlines have passed.⁹ Colleges say a student can be released from an ED commitment if aid makes attendance genuinely unaffordable, but the plaintiffs argue the binding language discourages families from testing that door.⁷

There is also an income skew in who uses the option. Among academically strong students, those from families earning over $250,000 are almost twice as likely to apply ED as those from families earning below $50,000.⁸

How the Schools Are Defending the Case

The 32 defendants filed a joint motion to dismiss. They argue the complaint fails to allege a genuine horizontal agreement among competitors, pointing to the absence of any “smoking gun” and to the fact that schools not named as defendants, including Harvard, Yale, and MIT, use similar early admissions practices. Parallel conduct alone, they say, is consistent with independent business decisions and does not add up to a conspiracy.²

They further argue the plaintiffs conflate lawful vertical agreements (between a school and its applicants, or between a school and an application platform) with an illegal horizontal conspiracy among schools. Membership in a trade association like COFHE, on its own, does not establish coordination.²

The defendants also contest the per se framing. Early decision, they say, has procompetitive benefits: it helps schools manage enrollment, reduces uncertainty, and matches committed students with institutions. Under the “rule of reason” analysis they say should apply, the plaintiffs have failed to define a relevant market, show market power, or demonstrate actual anticompetitive harm in the “distinctive nonprofit context” of higher education. And they argue that students choose ED voluntarily and cannot trace their injuries to a specific agreement among schools.²

A January 2026 analysis by Brookings economist Phillip Levine offers empirical ammunition for that defense. Looking at 66 colleges that enrolled 40% or more of their freshmen through ED, Levine found that heavier use of early decision was not associated with higher average tuition revenue or a lower share of Pell Grant recipients; he described the revenue effect as “small and statistically insignificant.” He acknowledged his analysis could not establish strict causation and cautioned that a universal policy shift might produce different results than the incremental changes he observed.⁸

Why the Financial Stakes Are Real: The 568 Presidents Group Case

The D’Amico lawsuit follows a separate antitrust case against a partially overlapping group of elite universities. In Henry v. Brown University, filed in the Northern District of Illinois, plaintiffs alleged that 17 schools colluded through the “568 Presidents Group” to use a shared formula for calculating financial need, effectively fixing aid pricing for over 200,000 students across two decades.¹⁰

By mid-2024, 10 of the 17 defendants had settled for a combined $284 million, with court approval in July 2024. Two more schools later settled, bringing total settlements to roughly $320 million according to plaintiffs’ counsel. The plaintiffs’ economic expert estimated total class damages at $685 million. Trial against the remaining non-settling defendants, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania, is scheduled for November 2026.¹¹¹²

Several defendants appear in both cases, among them Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Rice, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt. The 568 settlements give a rough sense of what is at stake if the early decision case survives dismissal and moves into discovery.

Regulatory Backdrop: The 2019 NACAC Consent Decree

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust complaint against the National Association for College Admission Counseling, alleging that NACAC’s Code of Ethics restricted member colleges from recruiting students who had already committed elsewhere, including through early decision, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. NACAC agreed to a consent decree removing three rules, including the restriction on recruiting ED admits, and was barred from adopting similar rules in the future.¹³ That consent decree established federal antitrust concern about restrictions on competition for admitted students, a principle the plaintiffs in D’Amico are now trying to extend to the schools themselves.

Where the Case Stands

The case (No. 1:25-cv-12221) is assigned to Judge Angel Kelley in the District of Massachusetts.¹⁴ Oral arguments on the defendants’ joint motion to dismiss were scheduled for May 1, 2026. The outcome will determine whether the case reaches discovery, where plaintiffs could seek internal emails, financial data, and COFHE records, or whether some or all claims are cut before that point.² Neither the defendant schools nor the application platforms have made public statements on the merits. Plaintiffs’ counsel has said the litigation could take years to resolve.

1
Cohen Milstein. Students File Landmark Lawsuit Alleging Elite Colleges Conspired to Present Early Decision as Binding, Inflate Tuition
2
Archer Law. Early Decision Admissions Anti-Trust Case Scheduled for Oral Argument
3
Higher Ed Dive. 32 Colleges Accused of Using Early Decision to Drive Up Costs
4
Cohen Milstein. Early Decision Antitrust Litigation
5
Cohen Milstein. Complaint, D’Amico v. Consortium on Financing Higher Education
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MIT. Consortium on Financing Higher Education
7
U.S. News & World Report. What Happens to Students Who Back Out of Early Decision Offers
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Brookings Institution. What Does Early Decision Do
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College Raptor. Should You Apply Early Decision or Early Action When Financial Aid Matters
10
Temple University Beasley School of Law. Federal Court Allows Price-Fixing Class Action to Proceed Against Universities
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ClassAction.org. Financial Aid Antitrust Settlement
12
Berger Montague. 568 Presidents Group Antitrust Litigation
13
U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Department Files Antitrust Case and Simultaneous Settlement Requiring Elimination of Anticompetitive Restraints
14
PACER Monitor. D’Amico et al v. Consortium on Financing Higher Education et al