A federal judge ruled that a Sherman Act case accusing 32 selective colleges of colluding through early decision can move into discovery, though claims against Common App and two nonprofit groups were dismissed.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts ruled Friday that an antitrust lawsuit against 32 elite colleges over their binding early-decision practices can proceed to discovery, rejecting the schools' bid to have the case thrown out. Coverage of the ruling reports the suit, filed in August 2025 by current and former students of Wesleyan, Vassar, and Washington University in St. Louis, alleges the colleges violated the Sherman Act by agreeing not to recruit or admit students already committed elsewhere through ED — an arrangement plaintiffs say suppresses competition, lets schools offer thinner aid packages, and favors applicants who can commit without comparing offers.
Named defendants include Amherst, Barnard, Bowdoin, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, Williams, and roughly a dozen other liberal arts colleges and research universities. Kelley dismissed the claims against Common App, the application platform Scoir, and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, finding the complaint didn't sufficiently allege those groups joined or facilitated the alleged conspiracy. The ruling doesn't decide whether the colleges actually broke the law — it clears the way for both sides to gather evidence before the claims are tested on the merits.
Nothing changes for this year's applicants. Every one of these 32 schools can run early decision exactly as before while the case crawls through discovery, which typically takes years. Do not build your senior-year strategy around a lawsuit outcome that is nowhere close to landing.
What the ruling does is put legal teeth behind something counselors already tell aid-sensitive families: ED trades a binding commitment for the ability to compare financial aid packages. That tradeoff is real whether or not this lawsuit eventually succeeds.
If you can pay full price, or you have run the net price calculator and are confident in the numbers, ED is still a legitimate way to convert certainty into a better shot at your top choice. Several of these 32 schools have real ED admit-rate bumps worth having.
If your family needs to weigh offers from multiple schools before committing, ED remains the wrong tool — regardless of how a court eventually rules on whether the colleges' coordination was illegal. You can't un-sign a binding agreement while waiting for litigation to catch up.
Discovery could eventually surface real evidence about how these schools coordinate on ED — admitted-student lists, financial aid benchmarking, shared data. If that evidence is damaging, it could reshape early decision policy down the road. That's a multi-year story, not something that affects the class applying this fall or next.
For now, treat every school's ED program as unchanged. Model your true cost of attendance before you bind yourself to one, and don't let a headline about a lawsuit talk you into (or out of) a strategy the underlying math doesn't support.
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