Lawyers’ ‘misleading statements’ hang cloud over college finaid class action

A federal judge won’t stop a class action alleging some of the country’s top higher education institutions colluded when awarding financial aid — but said they’ll have to replace their chosen class counsel because the original firm has been accused of its own misconduct, including unethical billing practices.

The class action originated in 2022 when 10 named student plaintiffs sued 17 private universities, accusing them of violating federal antitrust laws. Defendants included Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, Brown, Emory, Yale, California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Notre Dame, Penn and Rice.

The allegations center on institutional membership in the 568 Group, a university consortium that developed common standards for determining the ability to pay for colleges known as the Consensus Methodology. The alleged benefit for the schools was reducing competit...