A flurry of lawsuits against colleges are demanding tuition and housing refunds—but what is the likelihood of success?
College students forced off campus by COVID-19 have decided that completing their semester online from their childhood bedrooms is not what they’d signed up for! There are now a flood of lawsuits filed by students against universities across the country including Drexel University here in Philadelphia.
So how likely are the lawsuits to succeed? It will be an uphill battle. Most parents and students signed enrollment documents and tuition agreements at the start of the year that had clauses including mandatory arbitration clauses, guarantees of payment after a certain date in the semester regardless of whether the student finished the class, and other clauses that prohibit class action lawsuits like all those that have been filed, and while not all colleges have those agreements, many do and students will be bound by them.
But with fall semester now in doubt, parents and students are now wiser and will read those documents for next year with a new calculation: how much it’s worth for them to get on line classes instead of the real college experience.
From The Judge Group, I’m Amy E. Feldman for KYW News Radio.
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