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MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York federal appeals court on Thursday refused to overturn the dismissal of antitrust claims brought by two Brown University students who claim the Ivy League division’s longstanding prohibition on athletic scholarships and compensation amounts to illegal price fixing in violation of federal antitrust law.
“Plaintiffs’ failure to plead a relevant market is fatal to both their direct and indirect allegations of anticompetitive harm under the Sherman Act,” the Second Circuit panel wrote in its opinion, affirming the lower court’s dismissal of the student-athletes’ antitrust claims against the Ivy League colleges. “The District Court thus properly dismissed the plaintiffs’ sole claim.”
Collegiate athletes Tamenang Choh and Grace Kirk initially filed suit in Connecticut federal court in March 2023, naming as co-defendants Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, in addition to the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, the intercollegiate governing body that oversees athletic policies at the eight universities.
The class action focused on a pact among the elite schools from 1954 when the Ivy League athletic conference was founded — the so-called “Ivy League Agreement” — that prohibited athletic scholarships and affirmed athletes shall be admitted as students and financial aid will only be awarded on the basis of economic need.
Both plaintiffs, who played men’s and women’s basketball at Brown University, respectively, received need-based financial aid from Brown that did not cover the total of their tuition, fees, room and board and incidental expenses.
They claimed the ongoing Ivy League Agreement was price fixing that suppressed their overall financial aid, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, because without athletic scholarships, they were forced to pay more in tuition than they would otherwise.
The lower court dismissed the case the following year, finding that the plaintiffs had not properly defined the relevant market for their claims of anticompetitive effects.
On appeal before the Second Circuit, Choh and Kirk asked the three-judge panel to resuscitate the thrown-out case to undergo additional litigation, asserting that they had sufficiently and plausibly pleaded a horizontal price fixing conspiracy.
Ruling against the plaintiffs on appeal, the Second Circuit panel concluded they had failed to satisfy the requirements for defining a plausible relevant market for either the sale of educational services or the purchasing of athletic services.
“We reject plaintiffs’ contention that their allegations of direct anticompetitive harm excuse them from pleading a relevant market,” the three-judge panel wrote in its opinion, affirming the lower court’s conclusion.
During oral arguments before the Second Circuit in March 2026, the panel signaled its hesitance to reverse the Connecticut federal District Court’s dismissal of the complaint.
“The thing that makes this difficult to understand is that students go to different schools, not just because of the cost, the availability of an athletic or nonathletic scholarship. They may go for other reasons,” U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Wesley, a George W. Bush appointee, said at oral arguments last month, appearing remotely by video. “They might be interested in both, but they go for other reasons, don’t they? And so don’t you have a problem about the interchangeability here, the availability of alternatives?”
U.S. Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs, a George H.W. Bush appointee, proposed a hypothetical, querying if half of the competitors agree to pay nothing, whether or not the remaining half of the competitors were then “under much less pressure to offer fair and competitive rates” for elite student-athletes.
U.S. Circuit Judge Beth Robinson, a Joe Biden appointee from Vermont, joined Jacobs and Wesley on the panel, which did not immediately rule from the bench.
Representatives for both parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday afternoon.
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