ABA JOURNAL — Nine elite universities sometimes consider applicants’ ability to pay tuition during the admissions process, which means that the schools should not be entitled to an antitrust exemption that allows them to collaborate on financial aid formulas, a federal lawsuit has alleged. The antitrust lawsuit, filed Jan. 9, targets top schools that use a shared methodology to assess applicants’ financial needs when developing aid packages, report the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times and NBC News. An antitrust exemption, granted by a federal law known as Section 568, allows collaboration among schools that don’t consider financial status in admissions decisions. “The law benefited schools by allowing them to bypass bidding wars for low-income applicants,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “But in exchange, the schools were barred from favoring wealthy applicants to minimize how much money they gave away in scholarships.”