The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted Cornell and four other elite universities permission to appeal a federal judge’s decision to certify a class of approximately 200,000 current and former students in a long-running antitrust lawsuit on Aug. 24.
In a class action lawsuit, one or more plaintiffs file the suit on behalf of a larger group, known as the class, whose members may receive compensation based on the harm done to them. Certifying a class means allowing the contended group to proceed with litigation.
The decision to certify the class, which partially relied on a regression analysis by the plaintiffs’ expert, substantially increased the number of students estimated to have suffered economic injury. This increased the potential damages from $100,000 to over $1.7 billion.
The lawsuit, Henry et al. v. Brown University et al., alleges that 17 highly-selective universities including Cornell created an unlawful price-fixing scheme that reduced competition for financial aid and favored wealthy students under a group known as the 568 Presidents Group, which would violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Act federally prohibits monopolistic competition in interstate trade and commerce.
Between 2023 and 2025, 12 of the accused universities settled for nearly $320 million in total, with some payments reaching Cornell students and alumni over the summer.
Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University and the University of Notre Dame are the five remaining defendants in the suit, which was filed in 2022.
The appeals court based its decision to allow the universities to appeal on whether or not the study, a regression analysis done by the plaintiff’s expert, was “adequately analyzed” by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois.
In their argument, attorneys for the universities claimed that the expert used a flawed statistical model to establish economic injury across the class, including results “untethered from … common sense,” with estimations that had “wild and inexplicable year-to-year swings” in students’ charges.
If the universities choose to appeal and succeed, the approximately 200,000-person class could be narrowed or decertified.
Kennelly scheduled the trial to begin on Nov. 4.
A University spokesperson declined to comment on the update to the case.
Christine Savino is a second-year student in the Cornell Law School. She is a senior writer for the news department and can be reached at csavino@cornellsun.com.
