The College is facing a second lawsuit for a series of meetings with other schools during which administrators discussed how much financial aid they would give to prospective students.
Lawyers for Harvard graduate Anthony Ashby are asking the court to certify his lawsuit as a class action. That means thousands of students who received financial aid that year from any of the eight schools named in the suit could benefit from a ruling.
Ashby filed the legal action last spring in the Southern District Court of New York against a group of colleges that includes the eight Ivy League schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tom Soybel, the College's associate counsel in charge of Dartmouth's defense, said, "The general allegation is that by exchanging information the colleges depressed the amount of financial aid they offered."
A similar lawsuit was filed four years ago by Roger Kingsepp, a Wesleyan graduate. At that time, the Justice Department began investigating allegations that a group of colleges called the "Overlap Group" was discussing the amounts of financial aid they would offer to certain students. Ashby is represented by Kinsepp's lawyer.
In early 1991, each of the colleges under investigation except MIT signed an agreement ending the meetings to head off potential legal action by the federal government for price fixing.
A federal judge denied Kingsepp's attempt to file a class action suit two years ago. At that time his attorney dropped the case. Kinsepp unsuccessfully appealed the decision himself.
The only difference between the Kinsepp case and the new Ashby case is that Ashby graduated from Harvard, Soybel said.
"The allegations are almost identical," he said. "Everyone is treating it as a continuation of the [Kingsepp] case."
Soybel predicted that the motion for class-action status will be denied.
