Early Decision Lawsuit: Antitrust Claims Against 32 Colleges

Four students have filed a federal antitrust lawsuit challenging early decision admissions at 32 of the country’s most selective private colleges and universities, alleging that the schools coordinated to eliminate price competition and inflate what families pay. The early decision lawsuit, D’Amico v. Consortium on Financing Higher Education, was filed on August 8, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and also names the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), the Common Application, and Scoir, which operates the Coalition Application.¹² The plaintiffs are represented by Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Langer Grogan & Diver.³

Which Colleges Are Named as Defendants

The 32 institutions are Amherst, Barnard, Bowdoin, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Haverford, Johns Hopkins, Macalester, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Northwestern, Oberlin, Pomona, Rice, Smith, Swarthmore, Trinity, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Rochester, Vanderbilt, Vassar, Washington University in St. Louis, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Williams.⁴ All are current or former members of COFHE, an unincorporated consortium of elite private schools founded in 1974 that facilitated data sharing on admissions and financial aid. COFHE closed on December 31, 2025, during its 50th anniversary year.⁵

The named plaintiffs are Alayna D’Amico, Max Miller, Bella Robinson, and Bram Silbert, described in the complaint as three current students and one recent graduate of defendant schools.⁶ They are seeking class certification on behalf of students who enrolled full time at any defendant school within four years of the complaint and who either were admitted through early decision and received school-provided grant aid, or were admitted through any process and received no school-provided grant aid.³

What the Lawsuit Alleges

The complaint frames early decision as a coordinated agreement among competitors rather than a convention each school adopted on its own. Under early decision, an applicant designates one school as a first choice, agrees to enroll if admitted, and promises to withdraw all other applications, receiving a decision months before regular applicants. The plaintiffs allege this amounts to a “horizontal agreement to reduce or eliminate competition” and a “classic per se violation of the antitrust laws” under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, because participating schools gain what the complaint calls “exclusive access” to accepted students and effectively divide the market.⁶³

COFHE, according to the filing, was the vehicle through which member schools shared information about admitted students. The complaint cites a former administrator at multiple institutions who confirmed “direct knowledge of the sharing of Early Decision admit lists among COFHE-member schools.”⁷ The Common Application and Scoir are accused of providing the enforcement infrastructure, barring students from submitting more than one early decision application and removing accepted students from other schools’ prospective candidate lists.⁴

How the Alleged Harm Reaches Students

The complaint identifies several ways the system allegedly inflates what families pay. Because students must commit before seeing a financial aid package, they cannot shop offers or use competing awards as leverage, which the plaintiffs say removes the incentive for schools to offer generous aid to early admits.² When one early-decision school raises tuition, others can follow while still appearing competitive.⁴ Filling a large share of a class through early decision also shrinks the regular pool and, the plaintiffs contend, reduces both need-based and merit aid for early and regular applicants alike.⁸

The scale matters. Some schools fill roughly half of a freshman class through early decision; the University of Pennsylvania enrolled 53 percent of its Class of 2023 that way.⁹ Duke admitted 12.8 percent of early decision applicants for the Class of 2029, compared with 3.7 percent in regular decision.¹⁰ Enrollment yields for early decision run near 87 percent, versus about 25 percent for regular applicants. Research cited across policy organizations also finds that early decision disproportionately benefits wealthier applicants: students from families earning more than $250,000 who scored in the 90th percentile on standardized tests applied early decision 29 percent of the time, compared with 16 percent for identically qualified students from families earning under $50,000.¹¹

Is Early Decision Actually Binding?

One of the case’s more direct claims is that colleges present early decision as legally binding when it is not. The complaint contends the commitment is an honor-bound agreement with no enforceable contractual force, and that schools and application platforms use language designed to make applicants believe otherwise.⁶ A college cannot sue a student for tuition if the student withdraws.¹² Brown University’s dean of undergraduate admission, Logan Powell, told the Brown Daily Herald that the university has “never claimed that the early decision process is legally binding,” though Brown’s own materials describe it as “a binding agreement.”¹³

What the Plaintiffs Are Asking For

The lawsuit seeks three categories of relief: an injunction ending binding early decision at the defendant schools, monetary damages for students who allegedly paid more than they would have without the alleged conspiracy, and broader structural reforms to how these colleges run admissions and award aid.² The complaint does not specify a damages figure.¹

Where the Case Stands

The case is assigned to Judge Angel Kelley in the District of Massachusetts.¹⁴ By October 2025, multiple groups of defendants had filed motions to dismiss, arguing that early decision is not an illegal conspiracy because schools have no incentive to poach students who chose them as a first preference.¹⁵ The most recent public docket entry, dated June 5, 2026, is a motion by attorney Alex Bodaken to withdraw as counsel for the four named plaintiffs. No ruling on the motions to dismiss appears in the available record, and the case remains pending. Nothing in the case has yet changed how early decision operates at any of the named schools.

Related Antitrust Actions Against Elite Colleges

This is not the first federal antitrust attention paid to how these schools admit and price students. In April 2018, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division sent document-preservation letters to several elite colleges, opening an investigation into whether schools illegally exchanged information about students who had made early decision commitments. The probe was active in 2018; the research contains no public record of its conclusion.¹⁶

In December 2019, the DOJ filed a civil antitrust suit against the National Association for College Admission Counseling over three rules in its code of ethics, including one that prohibited schools from offering incentives exclusive to early decision applicants. NACAC members had already voted to remove the rules that September, and the organization entered a consent decree permanently barring reinstatement. The final judgment was entered on April 17, 2020, and is effective for seven years. That case did not challenge early decision itself.¹⁷¹⁸

A separate ongoing class action, Henry v. Brown University, filed in 2022 in the Northern District of Illinois, alleges that 17 universities formed a price-fixing cartel by using a shared formula to calculate financial aid while claiming to practice need-blind admissions. As of early 2026, 12 of the 17 defendants have settled for a combined total of roughly $320 million. Five remain: Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania. In January 2026, a federal judge denied those schools’ motions for summary judgment, finding that the plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence of an overarching conspiracy.¹⁹ Several of those schools, along with many that have already settled, are also named in the early decision lawsuit.

1
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2
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Case Filings Alert. Top Colleges Sued
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Law360. Schools Look to Duck Early Admissions Antitrust Case
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Department of Justice. U.S. v. National Association for College Admission Counseling
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Bloomberg Law. Elite Colleges Lose Bid to End Financial Aid Price-Fixing Case