Yale, Duke and Columbia among elite schools to settle in price-fixing case

For almost a quarter of a century, a coterie of the nation's most elite universities had a legal shield: They would be exempt from federal antitrust laws when they shared formulas to measure prospective students' financial needs.

But the provision included a crucial requirement: that the cooperating universities' admissions processes be "need-blind," meaning they could not factor in whether a prospective student was wealthy enough to pay.

A court filing Tuesday night revealed that five of those universities - Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale - have collectively agreed to pay $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of, in fact, weighing financial ability when they deliberated over the fates of some applicants.

Although the universities did not admit wrongdoing and resisted accusations that their approach had hurt students, the settlements...