INSIGHT: Valuing in-Person Classes in College Tuition Class Actions
Universities and colleges closed campuses and moved courses online in the middle of the spring semester in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. By summer, class action lawsuits had been filed against more than 100 colleges and universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Penn State, and the University of Southern California.
These complaints do not allege that schools were wrong to close campuses, but that they should have lowered tuition fees because an online education is not worth as much as the in-person version. (See Dutra v. Trustees of Boston University (D. Mass. April 29, 2020)).
Class certification in these matters often hinges on the question of whether plaintiffs can establish that common issues predominate over individual issues. Economic analysis can be helpful to courts in answering a key question: Does a formulaic method exist that can be used to determine injury and damages without the need for individualized inquiry?
In the context of tuition refund matters, the relevant question is: How subjective and individualized are students valuations of the in-person aspect of a college education?