Republican lawmakers launched a broad investigation into all eight Ivy League universities Tuesday, alleging they illegally colluded to inflate tuition prices, violating federal antitrust laws and burdening students with soaring costs.
Detailed, seven-page letters were sent to the university presidents at Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University demanding documents and communications to determine if their coordinated practices harm students and families.
The letters assert that Ivy League schools “collectively raise tuition prices while engaging in price discrimination by offering selective financial aid packages to maximize profit,” creating an “umbrella effect” that lets other colleges charge higher tuition than a competitive market would allow.
Allegations of price fixing in higher education is not new. A 1989 Department of Justice investigation into the Ivy League and MIT resulted in a 1991 lawsuit. Congress subsequently granted an antitrust exemption, which allowed schools for a period of time to coordinate formulas for financial aid. After that exemption expired in 2022, another lawsuit was filed against 17 elite schools alleging the practice continued. In January 2025, 12 of the schools settled the claims for $320 million.
The committee members alleged that the schools still “benefit from their prior collusion” and pointed to rising tuition (despite endowments like Harvard’s $53 billion), the Council of Ivy League Presidents’ admissions standards influencing wider markets, and lawsuits accusing the College Board and Common Application of enabling collusion to cut aid and raise fees. If true, the schools could face both civil and criminal prosecution for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits agreements restricting price, output, or quality competition.
Records show that Ivy League tuition has, in fact, surged far beyond overall inflation rates. Harvard’s total cost of attendance for 2024-25, including tuition, fees, room, and board, is $82,866. In 1980, Harvard’s cost was about $6,750. Adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $6,750 in 1980 equals roughly $24,300 in 2024 dollars. Yet, Harvard’s current cost is over three times higher.
The numbers are similar across the Ivy League, with average tuition and fees for 2023-24 reaching nearly $65,000 a year and total costs often topping $90,000, compared to around $9,000 in the early 1980s.
An overhaul of federal student loans, enacted in 2010 under President Obama as part of Obamacare — specifically, the portion dubbed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act — may have contributed to skyrocketing college costs. The law moved swiftly, ending the Federal Family Education Loan Program, cutting private lenders like Sallie Mae from issuing new federally guaranteed loans, and shifted all new lending to the Department of Education starting July 1 of that year.
The Obama administration promised the move would “free up nearly $68 billion for college affordability and deficit reduction over the next 11 years.”
But critics at the time warned the reforms would inflate tuition by flooding colleges with effectively limitless federal funds. Five years after it was signed into law, a New York Federal Reserve study found tuition rose 65 cents per dollar of increased loan availability, meaning colleges charged more because the government promised to pay, leaving students with bigger debts. In the decade following the reforms tuition jumped 40 percent — twice the 19 percent inflation rate.
The Tuesday letters, authored by House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH-04), Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), as well as Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI-05) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), demand school presidents respond by April 22 with documentation going back to 2019 that includes verifiable information on admissions, aid, and ties to entities like U.S. News and World Report, whose college ranking, lawmakers say, “provide a mechanism for elite colleges and universities to influence standards that drive output down and prices up.”
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Christina Botteri is the Executive Editor of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow her on X at @christinakb.
