Handy Overview on the Student Suits against Universities from Inside Higher Education
Over at Inside Higher Education (IHE), Doug Lederman provides a review of the fate of the hundreds of suits filed against colleges and universities by students claiming that they did not get the educational experience promised to them due to the colleges’ and universities’ responses to the pandemic. The news is mostly bad for plaintiffs, but some cases are proceeding to trial, and at least two schools have settled to end the suits.
As readers of this blog should know, most states do not recognize a cause of action for “educational malpractice,” nor do they entertain suits that would put courts in the position of second-guessing educational institutions about how best to deliver their curricula. It’s like a business judgment rule for higher education. The cases that succeed have to allege that the educational institution made some specific promise on which it failed to deliver. For the most part, courts seem to be more willing to entertain such claims as they relate to fees than tuition, a point not addressed in the IHE piece.
According to IHE, Southern New Hampshire University paid $1.25 million to settle claims brought against it, and Barry University paid $2.4 million. IHE does the math and figures that Barry’s claim comes out to about $350 per student, but that calculation does not take into account lawyers’ fees, nor is it clear whether all 7000 Barry students are eligible to be part of the plaintiff class. In any case, the point is that some institutions are willing to pay a bit to make these cases go away. Schools are especially vulnerable if they have developed online educational programs for which they charge less and if their in-person education became essentially indistinguishable from their online program as a result of closures necessitated by the pandemic.
H/T John Wladis.