Judge Dismisses Case Seeking Ivy League Athletic Scholarships
Credit: Winslow Townson / Stringer / Getty Images Sport- A district court judge dismissed a claim alleging Ivy League universities are guilty of price-fixing by failing to offer athletic scholarships.
- The class action suit was brought by two former Brown University basketball players.
- Plaintiffs failed to prove the Ivy League constitutes an exclusive market.
- The case could continue through the appeals process.
Ivy Leaguers won’t be receiving athletic scholarships, at least for now.
Alvin Thompson, a U.S. District Court judge in Connecticut, dismissed a class action suit alleging that the eight Ivy League schools were engaged in an illegal price-fixing agreement preventing student-athletes from earning scholarships and other forms of compensation.
The complaint, Choh v. Brown University, filed in March 2023, was brought by former Brown men’s basketball player Tamenang Choh and then-current Brown University women’s basketball player Grace Kirk.
It argued that the Ivy League agreement, the foundational 1954 document stipulating that student-athletes will receive only need-based aid and not athletic scholarships, “constitutes unlawful price fixing in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.”
Plaintiffs’ attorneys argued the agreement isn’t necessary “to preserve the unique nature of Ivy League athletics, where academic excellence is paramount,” pointing to other elite academic institutions such as Stanford University, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame, which “can maintain stellar academic standards while competing for excellent athletes, and without agreed upon limits on price.”
“The natural, foreseeable, and intended result of the Ivy League Agreement is that Ivy League athletes have paid more for their education and earned less in compensation or reimbursement than they would have in the absence of the agreement,” the claim said.
As such, plaintiffs sought a “permanent injunction … enjoining defendants from abiding by the Ivy League Agreement or any equivalent horizontal agreement,” along with damages.
The court ruled in favor of the defendants — the eight Ivy League schools and the Ivy League Council of Presidents — who had moved to dismiss the complaint.
At issue was the notion that the Ivy League constitutes a specific market for “athletically and academically high-achieving students.”
Curiously, while acknowledging Stanford, Duke, and Notre Dame, among other institutions, for maintaining high academic standards and offering athletic scholarships, the complaint argues that the Ivy League has held “monopoly power” in the market for academically high-achieving student-athletes.
The court refuted the claim that the Ivies represent a unique market in this respect, agreeing with the defendants that “these proposed market definitions fail for the simple reason that plaintiffs do not actually propose the contours of a relevant market.”Absent a well-defined, exclusive market, notes Noah Henderson, who teaches sport management at Loyola University Chicago, there is no restraint of trade.
“Simply put,” Henderson wrote in Sports Illustrated, “the decision to play sports at an Ivy League school is a unique choice athletes can make in sacrifice of other opportunities.”
The claim also referenced the 2021 NCAA v. Alston case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that antitrust laws prohibit the NCAA from limiting “education-related compensation or benefits” to student-athletes who play Division I basketball and football. The court recognized an athlete’s right to have schools compete for their services.
At the same time, writing in the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that individual conferences have considerable discretion under antitrust law when adopting amateurism rules.
So the Ivy League remains the only Division I conference not to offer athletic scholarships. The individual schools instead prefer to “foster campus cultures that do not prioritize athletics.”
But that could change.
In September of 2022, an antitrust exemption known as Section 568 expired. This exemption, part of the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994, was a congressional sanction allowing colleges to formulate common approaches to awarding need-based financial aid — as long as they strictly adhered to need-blind admissions.
Following this expiration, the National College Players Association (NCPA) “declared victory” for Ivy League athletes. Since the advent of Section 568, the NCPA claims, Ivy League schools had “wielded … undeserved special treatment,” enabling them to “impose a prohibition on all athletic scholarships.”
“It’s time for Ivy League universities to head in a new direction,” said NCPA Executive Director Ramogi Huma in a statement, “one where they respect their athletes’ rights and freedoms under the law.”
What’s more, although the Alston ruling doesn’t address individual conference policies per se, note attorneys Alan Cotler and Robert Litan, it has indirect implications for the Ivy League’s prohibition of athletic scholarships.
“The Ivy League’s prohibition of full scholarships for any students is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s holding against the NCAA in Alston,” Cotler and Litan wrote in Ivy Hoops Online.
“If the Ivy League does not change its current policy in the near future … Ivy schools then will be at risk of one or more antitrust suits that will give the lower courts, if not the Supreme Court, the chance to decide the issue of single-conference limits on ‘education-related compensation or benefits.'”
Meanwhile, Eric Cramer, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, believes this case against the Ivy League isn’t over.
“We are optimistic that the Second Circuit will reverse and send the case back for discovery and then trial,” Cramer said in a statement.