Washington — With the clock ticking toward adjournment, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Saturday that would extend until 2015 a law that allows colleges to share limited amounts of information about their approaches to awarding student aid.

The law, which was set to expire on Tuesday, was enacted in 1992, after the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against 23 elite institutions, known as the Overlap Group, that had met annually to determine aid awards for every student admitted to more than one of them.

The renewed law exempts colleges from some antitrust provisions, enabling them to use a common method for assessing a family’s financial need, as long as they make need-blind admissions.

Proponents of the antitrust exemption argue that developing common aid practices reduces variation among award packages offered to the same students, allowing them to make enrollment decisions on the basis of factors other than cost. Opponents say the exemption reduces competition among institutions and could force all students to pay more for college.

In 2006 the Government Accountability Office issued a report that found that the two dozen highly selective private colleges that use the consensus approach had not been enrolling significantly more or fewer low-income or minority students since they began using the agreed-upon aid practices. It also found that the approach had not markedly affected how affordable those colleges are for families.

Members of the House had hoped to make the exemption permanent and passed a bill in April that would have done so. But some members of the Senate objected, and on Thursday the Senate passed an amended bill that extended the extension for seven years. The House passed the Senate’s version on Saturday.

In remarks on the House floor, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat of California, said the bill would ensure that colleges “don’t have to compete for the very top students, which could result in some students, the top students, getting excess aid while the rest of the applicant pool receives less or, in some cases, none at all.” —Kelly Field