The tally of universities getting hit by lawsuits over 403(b)fees and their fiduciary duty continues to go up.

On Tuesday, Sanford Heisler LLP filed a class complaint in theU.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claimingColumbia University breached its obligation under the EmployeeRetirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to prudently invest itsemployees' retirement savings. Similar complaints have been brought against the 403(b) plans at NewYork University, Yale University, Duke, Johns Hopkins,the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt, as wellas a slightly different complaint against Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology's 401(k) plan.

“Until employers recognize their duties and fulfill theirduties, these cases will keep coming,” Charles Field, a partner ofSanford Heisler and co-lead counsel for the plaintiff, toldThinkAdvisor.

In a class complaint seeking $100 million in damages, PlaintiffJane Doe, a faculty member at Columbia University and a participantof the university's retirement plans, sued on behalf of herself anda class of 27,000 current and former Columbia University employeeswho participated in the plans. The complaint alleges that theuniversity breached its fiduciary duties under ERISA.

“In these types of plans that are established under ERISA, theyowe a duty to their employees to not only construct an efficientplan that is cost-efficient but they also have to monitor theportfolio and dispose of any investments that are bad,” Field toldThinkAdvisor. “And we've looked at [Columbia] and we felt that theyfailed in that duty and that these people should be able to get themoney back, their retirement savings that were lost to this failureto abide by ERISA.”

Columbia University, as well as University Vice President ofHuman Resources Dianne Kenney, who administers the plans, are namedas defendants.

In a statement, Columbia University said: “Columbia is proud ofthe retirement benefits offered to its faculty and staff and takesits responsibility as a fiduciary seriously. Columbia does notcomment on pending litigation.”

The case against Columbia is very similar to the cases alreadybrought against NYU and Yale, according toField.

All three universities' plans used the same two providers, whichare also called record keepers, TIAA-CREF and Vanguard. (AlthoughYale consolidated to a single record keeper, TIAA-CREF, in April2015.) And all the plans had more than 100 investment options forfaculty.

“We looked at Columbia's retirement plan. It's a 403(b) plan,and we noticed that it looks like they shopped at the same tailoras the other universities,” Field told ThinkAdvisor. “They had verysimilar plan construction and they had the same record keepers.There was an overlap of the same type of funds. They weren'tidentical, but there was an overlap.”

According to the complaint, Columbia retained expensive andpoor-performing investment options that consistently underperformedtheir benchmarks, causing its plans and their participants tosuffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to retirementsavings. The complaint against Columbia specifically calls outTIAA-CREF Stock Account R3, which is a variable annuity, as one ofthe poor performers. According to the complaint, the CREF StockAccount has historically underperformed its benchmarks and otherlower-cost investments that were available for inclusion in itsretirement plans.

“[T]he investment performance for the TIAA-CREF Stock AccountR3, which represented almost $1 billion of the plans' assets,ranked in the bottom quartile for the past 3, 5, and 10 years forlike investments according to Morningstar,” the complaintstates.

The cases against NYU and Yale also specifically cite thisinvestment option (CREF Stock Account), among others.

The lawsuit against Columbia also charges that the university'splans offer excessively duplicative investments to beneficiaries,which according to the complaint violates the industry principlethat “too many choices harm participants, and can lead planparticipants to 'decision paralysis' and selection of inferiorinvestments.”

In addition, the complaint alleges that the plans chargeexcessive fees for recordkeeping, administrative, and investmentservices, and retain excessively expensive retail share classoptions despite the lower-cost options available to theirplans.