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Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

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Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#111

Post by krapht »

andreilys wrote: post #57
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are not arguing this. If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits. The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees…

Georgia tech offers a fantastic online CS masters program for $6.6k (1/6th of the cost of on campus degree). I highly doubt that these universities have offered even close to a 5/6th refund to their students.

Eh, qualify fantastic. It's great in that the courses are difficult, and if you complete them it will signal you are smart computer scientist; it's backed by GaTech's name brand and the diploma is the same as the on-campus diploma.

It's not fantastic in that the courses vary wildly in quality, are mostly taught by teaching assistants, can require 20 or more hours of (busy-ish depending on course) work per week, and just like undergrad, you will struggle and be forced to teach yourself the material instead of being taught a significant portion of the time. Usually the textbook is much more informative than the lecture; your life is better if you own many textbooks on the subject since often the lecture information density and coherence is poor.

What I'm saying is, the course lectures are pretty mediocre for ~40% of offered courses. OMSCS is valuable because it's cheap and prestigious, not because the instruction is high-quality. It's great for self-starters, auto-didacts, and hard-workers with background in the subjects (admittedly, most students from decent engineering schools will qualify).

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#112

Post by usaar333 »

LanceH wrote: post #7
easterncalculus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does have legal liability is an act of god clause. If any sort of language like that is in whatever's being signed this situation certainly qualifies.

A force majeure contract absolves them of delivering their service. It doesn't mean they get to change their service however they see fit and keep all the money. People up front for an in person semester. If they really want to go the force majeure route, they should return the money up front and renegotiate the rest of the semester.

Sure, they can return some money but who knows how much was already allocated, especially with distance learning continuing. I got no refund from my kid's preschool for similar reasons.

This is a really uphill legal battle

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#113

Post by btilly »

IdoRA wrote: post #92
mdszy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, why won't anyone think of the poor administrators who get paid obnoxious salaries for doing effectively none of the labor that goes into providing an education for the students.

Keep in mind that if you're not a professor, you're an administrator. Most university administrators are grossly underpaid relative to industry. Also keep in mind that the mission of public universities is more expansive than education for students.

Whether administrators are considered underpaid or overpaid relative to industry depends on what industry jobs you consider comparable. Readily available comparisons tend to be prepared by administrators themselves. There is an obvious bias here.

If the comparisons were fair, then I would expect to see university administrators switching back and forth to industry, with salaries going up and down, and for them to offer reasons both ways as to why they did so. That expectation is based on what we actually DO see happen with professors in employable subjects like computer science and engineering. However we DON'T see it happen administrators.

I therefore conclude that administrators are worth less to industry than they think they should be. Which fits with my opinion that they are worth less to education than their pay suggests. And fits with my further opinion that the current growth in number and salary of university administrators is unsustainable and is a luxury that our society cannot afford. Particularly the part of our society that is university graduates with crushing loan debt - which are the people who paid for those administrators and did not receive sufficient benefit from it for the debts that they bear.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#114

Post by adminprof »

tengbretson wrote: post #109
adminprof wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the Coll…

I don't think this needs to be settled ahead of time. If we shut off the tap of infinite student debt funding I guarantee the universities will magically discover what administrators and departments are dispensable quicker than you can imagine.

I don't see what assurances you have of this guarantee you give. As so far it seems like when funding is cut, faculty (teaching and research) and academic departments are cut and financial aid is reduced, rather than major cuts in administration. So it's worth discussing what administrative units are cuttable, or come to the realization there is no free cuts to make to administration without sacrifices to some existing principles.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#115

Post by pkaye »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #32
ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

which college is this, if you don't mind me asking? I mean the dean of HR is making 1million ...

BTW for California state employees including the public universities, the information is public so you can actually look it up.

https://transparentcalifornia.com/agencies/salaries/#univers...

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#116

Post by onemoresoop »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #105
ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere. The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.

Yeah, hope this is clear that this is not happening everywhere. However, where it’s happening it should be exposed.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#117

Post by xhkkffbf »

ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

Those who want to learn more about the alumni complaints can go to this web site:

https://renewrensselaer.org/

It's really sad the plunder.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#118

Post by willcipriano »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #35
jkingsbery wrote: post #26

I don't know about the legal question, but I think universities are setting themselves up for pain by arguing that the online experience they've been offering isn't substantially different from the in-person experience they had been offering. It's easy to imagine people calling their bluff on this, choosing to do remote learning even after COVID-19 goes away if it will save $100k+ over 4 years, and a subsequent contr…

Universities are not arguing this. If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits. The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees…

>it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate

I feel its not reasonable to ask students to pay more than fair market value for what they receive regardless of operational costs. They should refund up to what similar online schools charge today.

If it costs the auto dealer as much as a new BMW to deliver a used Toyota, that isn't my problem I'm only paying used Toyota pricing or I'm taking the matter to court.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#119

Post by tengbretson »

adminprof wrote: post #114
tengbretson wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this needs to be settled ahead of time. If we shut off the tap of infinite student debt funding I guarantee the universities will magically discover what administrators and departments are dispensable quicker than you can imagine.

I don't see what assurances you have of this guarantee you give. As so far it seems like when funding is cut, faculty (teaching and research) and academic departments are cut and financial aid is reduced, rather than major cuts in administration. So it's worth discussing what administrative units are cuttable, or come to the realization there is no free cuts to make to administration without sacrifices to some existi…

If we can't trust these organizations to make the right (and obviously needed) cuts in order to still realize their value to society in the face of reduced funding, then they don't deserve to be the ones teaching our children in the first place.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#120

Post by KingMachiavelli »

alistairSH wrote: post #51
albntomat0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall point, but one of the issues with online learning is the credential received isn't the same value as an in-person one. There are an increasing number of exceptions like the Georgia Tech online masters, but I'm not aware of a high-end online bachelors degree.

Harvard Extension Campus offers quite a few. While not viewed as favorably as an on-campus degree from Harvard, still valued higher than an on-campus degree from many other institutions. https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...

Interesting, it's a BS in liberal arts but offers CS as a field of study? Seems odd.
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