The early decision lawsuit reached discovery, not a verdict

On 7 August 2026 a federal judge in Massachusetts refused to throw out an antitrust case against thirty-two private colleges over binding early decision. Surviving that motion is a real step and it is a smaller one than it sounds, because of what a court is allowed to do at that point in a case. The difference matters to any family whose child is deciding this month whether to sign an early decision agreement before the November deadlines.

We build an admissions advisory for students in grades 7 to 12, and we ship a page that tells a student which schools give them the largest early-application boost. That makes this ours twice over. Every quotation below is from the court's own order, the complaint, or the agreement form itself, and each is labelled so you can tell which. The last section is the part that is bad news for us.

What the order did on 7 August

Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts denied the school defendants' motion to dismiss and granted the motion brought by the three non-school defendants. The case is D'Amico v. Consortium on Financing Higher Education, civil action 25-CV-12221-AK, filed on 8 August 2025 by four named plaintiffs on behalf of themselves and a proposed class.

It is a single count under Section 1 of the Sherman Act against thirty-two private universities, two application platforms and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. The plaintiffs allege the schools agreed not to compete for students already admitted elsewhere through early decision, and that the agreement let them raise tuition and reduce aid.

The court pointed to one document in particular. The plaintiffs cite the Ivy League Joint Statement, under which member schools, in the order's description, agree to refrain from competing for students accepted through other Ivy League schools' early decision programs. Only some defendants are parties to it. The plaintiffs allege the rest acted in accordance with its terms anyway, and the court held they need not show that every defendant joined in order to survive dismissal. The statement's signatories include schools that run no early decision plan at all, such as Harvard and Yale, neither of which is a defendant here.

Denying a motion to dismiss means the case continues. It does not mean the court weighed the evidence.

The court had to treat the factual allegations as true

This is the sentence most summaries leave out, and the order puts it near the top: "All facts taken from the Complaint are accepted as true for purposes of a motion to dismiss."

That is not a judge being persuaded. It is the standard the rule sets, and it is narrower than it first reads. The order draws the line itself: "Factual allegations must be accepted as true, while legal conclusions are not entitled to credit." What the court must swallow whole are the plaintiffs' factual assertions, not their characterisation of what those facts add up to.

Within that limit the assumption is strong. "A court may not disregard properly pleaded factual allegations even if actual proof of those facts is improbable." On the antitrust question specifically, "[a]t the pleading stage, plaintiffs need not offer definitive, or even probable, proof of a conspiracy."

The order then declines the exact comparison a reader wants it to make, quoting First Circuit precedent: "[i]t is not for the court to decide, at the pleading stage, which inferences are more plausible than other competing inferences, since those questions are properly left to the factfinder."

So the ruling means the claims survived dismissal and the case continues. It decides nothing about whether they are true. Whether any of it happened is the question the case now goes on to answer.

Common App and Scoir are out of the case

The same order dismissed all three non-school defendants: The Common Application Inc., Scoir Inc., which runs the Coalition App, and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. The court found the complaint did not allege that those organisations joined the agreement it describes.

Worth being exact about, because "Common App sued over early decision" travelled widely and no longer describes the case. The platforms still appear in the plaintiffs' account, in a narrower role: the complaint alleges that the schools use information from the Common App or the Coalition App to implement and police the restrictions, and separately that the schools exchange lists of students admitted through early decision. The list-swapping is alleged against the colleges, not the platforms.

The class is a request, not a group

The plaintiffs ask to represent everyone who enrolled full time as an undergraduate at one of the thirty-two schools in the four years before the complaint was filed, and onward through the period in which the effects of the alleged conduct continue. The order records that the proposed class excludes students whose financial aid grants met the full cost of attendance, and splits the rest into two groups: students admitted through early decision who received grant aid for at least one semester, and students admitted through any route who received no grant aid at all.

That class has not been certified. Until it is, it is a request.

The form already lets a student seeking aid wait

Here is the part a family can use this autumn, and it has nothing to do with the ruling.

The Common App early decision agreement, in the 2025 to 2026 form, tells the accepted student to promptly withdraw other applications. The next sentence carves out an exception: "If the student is an early decision candidate and is seeking financial aid, the student need not withdraw other applications until the student has received notification about financial aid from the admitting early decision institution."

A student seeking aid is not required to withdraw anything until the aid decision arrives. That sits on the form, above the signature line, and it is the sentence in the whole document that a family is most likely to benefit from having read.

The same form asks the student to acknowledge that "this institution may share my name and my early commitment with other institutions." That is a narrower disclosure than the conduct the complaint describes, which runs to schools exchanging lists and acting on what they receive. A family should read the sentence as telling them the college may pass their name on, and not as a summary of what is being litigated.

Two cautions. That was the form for the 2025 to 2026 cycle. Check the version your child's college posts for the cycle they are applying in rather than assuming the wording carried over. And while the order records that the commitment "is not actually legally binding," that is a statement about legal enforceability, not an invitation to treat the promise casually. A counsellor signs the same page, and so does a parent.

The ruling changes nothing you need to do this season

The order resolves two motions and grants no other relief. If your child is applying early this autumn, the ruling gives them nothing to do differently. The order says the allegations raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence of an agreement, which is the standard for letting a case proceed.

A family that reads the ruling as proof and abandons an early decision plan they had good reasons for is acting on something the order did not say. A family that reads it and then goes and reads the aid clause on the form has gained something they can use in November.

What the complaint actually alleges

The complaint does not dispute that the boost is real. It alleges that it is: paragraph 144 says that applying early decision increases the likelihood of acceptance at each of the defendant schools. What it alleges is that the boost is the inducement. Paragraph 126 describes schools isolating applicants who can pay full tuition and have signalled they will not take a competing offer, and says those students accept an inflated price "in exchange for the apparent possibility of an increased likelihood of acceptance to a single school." Paragraph 127 alleges that full tuition at schools running early decision runs "on average, thousands of dollars higher" than at comparable schools without it. The complaint puts no sample or figures behind that average, and every word of it remains an allegation, tested so far only against the standard that applies to a motion to dismiss.

We should say where that leaves us. Our early decision tool ranks schools by the size of that boost, and twenty-four of the thirty-two defendant institutions are in it. If the allegations are proved, we have been ranking schools by the size of an inducement and calling it an advantage.