Two Stanford University students have filed a class action lawsuit against the eight universities named in the college admissions scandal, claiming their degrees from Stanford have been tarnished and that the rigged system of paying for admission denied students a fair chance to be enrolled at an elite university.

Stanford University, ranked #7 in US News & World Report rankings, is named along with USC, UCLA, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, Wake Forest University, Yale University and Georgetown University. The class action lawsuit seeks damages for any student who applied to one or more of those universities and was rejected between 2012 and last year.

The named plaintiffs in this case, Stanford students Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods, both allege they were among those who were denied by elite schools named in the investigation. Olsen said she applied to Yale, paid a $80 application fee, and was denied admission, despite a nearly perfect SAT and ACT score and her extracurriculars. Olsen is a student at Stanford.

“Had she known that the system at Yale University was warped and rigged by fraud, she would not have spent the money to apply to the school,” the lawsuit states. “She also did not receive what she paid for — a fair admissions consideration process.”

—Source: LATimes.com