NEW YORK, Aug. 10 (UPI) — New York University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are facing lawsuits for allegedly making retirement-savings plan members pay exorbitant fees.

NYU, Yale and MIT — each having retirement plans holding over $3 billion in assets — are being individually sued by employees looking to establish a class-action lawsuit.

Two of the three lawsuits are related to 403(b) retirement savings plans, which are similar to 401(k) plans but are offered by public schools and nonprofit institutions such as hospitals and universities. Yale and NYU offer 403(b) plans and MIT offers a 401(k) plan.

According to court documents filed by the plaintiffs, the universities, which sponsored the plan, allegedly failed to monitor excessive fees paid to administer the retirement-savings plans. The complaint also alleges the universities did not replace expensive, poorly-performing investments with cheaper options.

Retirement-savings plan members could have collectively saved tens of millions of dollars if the universities used their bargaining power to cut costs, the complaints allege.

In one specific allegation within the complex lawsuits, retirement-savings plan members paid fees 870 percent times “higher than a reasonable fee for these services, resulting in millions of dollars in excessive recordkeeping fees each year,” the complaint against NYU alleges.

“Defendant failed to prudently monitor and control the compensation paid for recordkeeping and administrative services,” the NYU complaint said. “Therefore, defendant caused the participants … to pay unreasonable expenses for administration. Had defendant ensured that participants only paid reasonable fees for administrative and recordkeeping services … participants would not have lost in excess of $43 million of their retirement savings.”

In a statement, NYU Vice President for Public Affairs John Beckman said the university will “litigate this case vigorously and expect to prevail.”

“NYU takes seriously the welfare of our faculty and employees — including a dignified retirement — and the retirement plans offered to them are chosen and administered carefully and prudently,” Beckman said.

In the MIT complaint, the fees were allegedly up to 15,000 percent higher than standard fees. The lawsuit against Yale also accuses the institution of enabling excessive fees, taking on too many similar investments, and using higher-cost funds instead of identical, lower-priced funds. The lawsuits were filed Tuesday by Jerome J. Schlichter, known as a pioneer in retirement plan litigation.