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A college student’s parent has filed a class action lawsuit against the University of San Fransisco, saying the college should give out COVID-19 refunds.
The University of San Fransisco class action lawsuit was filed by Susan Legge, a Florida resident whose son is an undergraduate student at USF, a private Jesuit university.
She explains that she pays for her son’s education, and was finically injured by the school’s choice to suspend in-person education and activities during the coronavirus pandemic.
Legge goes on to state that her son is pursuing a degree in Finance at USF. She argues that the Finance program at USF “relies extensively” on in-person learning experiences, stating that the program emphasizes student presentations, collaboration between students and access to the university’s facilities.
Legge says she paid the University of San Fransisco around $18,000 in tuition and fees for her son to attend the spring 2020 semester. She says that the spring semester ran from Jan. 21, 2020 to May 14, 2020. Allegedly, after she paid tuition and fees, the school made the decision to move all classes online and suspend in-person activities.
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Providing more details, Legge states that the university made an announcement about COVID-19 on its website on March 11, 2020. The university said that classes would be canceled for March 16 and 17, and would be conducted online beginning on March 18.
The university reportedly followed this announcement with a March 14, 2020 notice that students would not return to in-person learning for the rest of the semester, but instead, classes would be held online for the duration for the semester.
The University of San Fransisco tuition class action lawsuit says that despite these changes, the school has not offered refunds. In Legge’s view, the COVID-19 closures radically changed her son’s learning environment, as well as the learning environment of other students.
She says that her son chose to attend the university and she paid the tuition and fees specifically to gain access to the college’s on-campus learning experiences and the benefits that come with it.
The plaintiff claims that if she had known that classes would be conducted online, she and her son would not have selected University of San Francisco, or would not have agreed to pay the same amount of money to attend the school.
The University of San Francisco coronavirus class action lawsuit goes on to assert that the online learning opportunities offered by the university are of lower quality than the in-person learning experiences.
Allegedly, the online coursework suffers due to the lack of opportunities for collaborative learning, lack of access to facilities, dearth of materials, and lack of interaction with faculty.
Legge stresses that “the fact that USF students paid a higher price for an in-person education than they would have paid for an online education is illustrated clearly by the fact that USF does not maintain an established online program.”
Because students and their families were provided with a lower-quality education than what they paid for, according to Legge, the school should refund tuition and fees.
Specifically, the plaintiff seeks a refund of the portion and fees that went towards the part of the spring 2020 semester that was conducted online.
She wants these refunds not only on behalf of herself, but on behalf of a proposed Class of all people who paid tuition and fees to the University of San Fransisco for the spring 2020 semester for educational services and who did not receive refunds for these payments. The plaintiff also seeks to establish a subclass for Florida residents who did the same.
According to Legge, USF’s failure to offer refunds after the university’s classes moved online represents a breach of contract, because she and others paid for one service but received another.
The plaintiff also says that the school was unjustly enriched by its failure to refund, because it effectively passed off the costs of dealing with the pandemic to its students and their families.
She seeks injunctive relief preventing the school from continuing to retain funds and not offer refunds in light of coronavirus-related changes to its students’ education.
Legge is represented by L. Timothy Fisher, Frederick J. Klorczyk III, and Sarah N. Westcot of Bursor & Fisher PA.
The University of San Fransisco Tuition COVID-19 Refund Class Action Lawsuit is Susan Legge v. University of San Fransisco, Case No. 3:20-cv-03406-LB, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
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