PI 2.3 Price Fixing. An antitrust case launched more than a decade ago sent tremors throughout the academic community. Over the 1989-1991 period, the US Department of Justice

(DOJ) investigated a number of highly selective private colleges for price fixing. The investigation focused on 'overlap group' meetings comprising about half of the most selective private colleges and universities in the USA. The group included 23 colleges, from small liberal arts schools like Colby, Vassar, and Middlebury to larger research universities like Princeton and MIT. DOJ found that when students applied to more than one of the 23 institutions, school officials met to coordinate the exact calculation ofsuch students' financial need.