Johns Hopkins University agreed on Friday to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it’s among 17 elite colleges that overcharged students by colluding on financial aid formulas.

The university will pay $18.5 million in cash to the plaintiffs, according to the court filings. The institutions involved in the lawsuit were part of the now-defunct 568 Presidents Group, which included a number of elite universities.

The price-fixing lawsuit alleged Johns Hopkins colluded with other prestigious colleges to reduce the competition for prospective students and drive down the amount of financial aid they would offer, all while giving special preference to the children of wealthy donors.

Plaintiffs alleged the universities used a shared “methodology” and shared “principles” to calculate the financial need of approximately 200,000 students in a way that reduced the dollars awarded by the universities to those students as financial aid, with the result that the students overpaid for their education.

The class-action lawsuit, which was filed in January 2022, has already received settlements from Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Emory University, Northwestern University, Rice University, Vanderbilt University and Yale University.

With the addition of Johns Hopkins and the California Institute of Technology, the total monetary amount of the settlements is nearly $320 million. The only remaining non-settling defendants are Cornell University, Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania.

“The fact and amount of these settlements bear out our allegations,” said Ted Normand, a co-lead attorney of the plaintiffs in a statement. “Our goal now is to show that the remaining defendants are liable for the rest.”

Johns Hopkins announced it would settle the lawsuit last month.

The university has not responded to requests for comment. Last month, when the intent to settle was announced, a spokesperson said that “as one of the top universities in the country for financial aid, Johns Hopkins is proud of its full commitment to need-blind admissions.”

The spokesperson continued, at the time: “All undergraduate scholarships meet 100% of demonstrated financial need and this fall, Hopkins undergraduates had the lowest median student debt among all national universities, expanding access for the highest achieving students, regardless of their financial circumstances.”

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