House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Harvard University on Thursday after the university failed to provide adequate documentation for the committee’s inquiries into suspected antitrust violations.

The subpoena was sent to Harvard President Alan Garber after the university failed to abide by a previous deadline of April 22. The goal of the committee’s investigation is to determine if Harvard is violating antitrust laws relating to tuition costs and financial aid packages.

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“We are particularly concerned that Ivy League member institutions appear to collectively raise tuition prices while engaging in price discrimination by offering selective financial aid packages to maximize profit,” the committee wrote in their initial request to Harvard on April 8. “By apparently engaging in anticompetitive pricing practices, Harvard University may be acting inconsistent with U.S. antitrust laws.”

The committee asked Harvard to provide all documents, records, and communications relating to admissions from Jan. 1, 2019, to the present day by April 22 in their initial request. Instead of cooperating, the university waited until the deadline to ask for their first extension and didn’t provide any documents until May 22. 

By June 25, the university had only provided 380 documents, which the committee referred to as “one of the lowest totals among Ivy League institutions,” and the university refused to commit to a specific date when it would fully comply with the committee’s record request, prompting them to issue the subpoena.

Price discrimination isn’t illegal, but it is illegal for schools like Harvard to collude with other Ivy League schools and together establish the same maximum price each admitted student can afford to pay. This takes away students’ ability to compare the prices of schools and the financial aid packages they offer to determine which one is best for them financially, according to the April 8 request.

The committee argued that such an agreement among elite universities would be illegal because Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act “makes certain agreements among competitors illegal. Agreements that limit competition on price, output, or quality of products and services can be illegal.”

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Previously, there was an exemption that allowed for this kind of agreement, but it was eliminated by Congress in 2022 after a lawsuit alleged that universities were taking advantage of it. One of the requirements of the exemption was that schools couldn’t let an applicant’s financial need influence their admissions decisions, yet the lawsuit cited a comment from one college administrator who allegedly said, “Sure hope the wealthy next year raise a few more smart kids!”

The subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee now requires Harvard to produce all requested documents no later than July 17.