Students suing universities over remote learning

[Cheerful]

The key is that many people think that this situation, and its resulting disruptions, only applies to them. Feeling disappointed is natural. Realizing you aren't the only one being affected requires maturity. Many are lacking in the latter category.

Some of our students were shocked when we asked them to pack up their dorm rooms on short notice. Sure, it was an inconvenience, but had they not done that, they still wouldn't have their stuff now. And it wasn't like we were the only college moving students off campus on short notice. But there was plenty of opinion on how inconvenienced they felt. Yeah, get at the back of the line, kid. We are all inconvenienced. From the person trying to buy groceries, to the person in the unemployment line, down to the loved ones not able to be by the bedside of their dying loved ones. We are all doing the best we can. If you can't see that, you are seriously lacking in humanity, and no amount of money or in-person classes can fix that.

+1  Also so much whining about losing out on traditional commencement -- high school and college levels.  Disappointing, yes.  As bad as lots of other COVID burdens and misery people are enduring?  Not even close.

[dismalist]

Here's an article that discusses a lot of these issues:
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/09/as-elite-colleges-go-remote-students-revolt-against-the-state-of-higher-ed/

A sample from the article:

These lawsuits reveal very different arguments about what the value of a college degree is. One claim is that "the value of any degree issued on the basis of online or pass/fail classes will be diminished." This claim rests on the idea of job-market signaling in economics, in which the value of a degree comes from the positive signal that it communicates to an employer—for example, tenacity in sticking it out to obtain that education credential, or intrinsic intelligence in navigating the college maze.

Yeah.

The present predicament affects everybody, not just a  college or two. Hence, the move to on-line will penalize [or not] everybody equally. Thus, relative prestige remains unaffected, and that is what signalling is all about, relative position. And colleges have made sure that GPA's remain unaffected, so that such signalling also remains unchanged.

More tangibly, what is impaired by going on-line is the consumption experience. No sports. No booze ups. No goofing off.  I doubt anybody would sue on these grounds, though. :-)

Thus, I believe the present pandemic will have a near zero permanent affect on higher education. The sector will get smaller, but that has been trend. Nothing to do with the virus.

CSU goes to on-line in Fall.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-cal-state-university-system-moves-toward-virtual-learning-for-fall-2020/

It's gonna be a take it or leave it proposition.

Let's see what happens.

[Caracal]

CSU goes to on-line in Fall.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-cal-state-university-system-moves-toward-virtual-learning-for-fall-2020/

It's gonna be a take it or leave it proposition.

Let's see what happens.

It is a weird and complicated decision to have to make. The problem is that you're trying to understand what the situation will be like in four months in the face of an evolving, and impossible to predict, crisis. Deciding to move everything online in the Fall is an irreversible decision. The other decision, to announce the intention to have in person classes is reversible, but comes with its own costs. My University has announced that the plan is to open, and they've started working on a plan.

I worry mostly that we aren't going to get any clear answers on what the trigger is for additional decisions. What sort of local spike in cases would trigger us to move online before or during the semester? What about transmission linked to the school? I worry that without clearly communicated protocols you could have a lot of panic among faculty and students.

[marshwiggle]

CSU goes to on-line in Fall.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-cal-state-university-system-moves-toward-virtual-learning-for-fall-2020/

It's gonna be a take it or leave it proposition.

Let's see what happens.

It is a weird and complicated decision to have to make. The problem is that you're trying to understand what the situation will be like in four months in the face of an evolving, and impossible to predict, crisis. Deciding to move everything online in the Fall is an irreversible decision. The other decision, to announce the intention to have in person classes is reversible, but comes with its own costs. My University has announced that the plan is to open, and they've started working on a plan.

I worry mostly that we aren't going to get any clear answers on what the trigger is for additional decisions. What sort of local spike in cases would trigger us to move online before or during the semester? What about transmission linked to the school? I worry that without clearly communicated protocols you could have a lot of panic among faculty and students.

The problem with assuming you'll be in person, and waiting to see if you'll need to be online, is that it delays prepping for the latter. I do labs for several courses, so virtualizing those is a LOT of work; I have to be on that already because if the university waits until July to decide we're going to be online it would be a nightmare to try and get everything done starting then. (If things got a lot better so that face to face was possible, it would be much easier to "switch" to the old way in that scenario.)

[apl68]

The key is that many people think that this situation, and its resulting disruptions, only applies to them. Feeling disappointed is natural. Realizing you aren't the only one being affected requires maturity. Many are lacking in the latter category.

Some of our students were shocked when we asked them to pack up their dorm rooms on short notice. Sure, it was an inconvenience, but had they not done that, they still wouldn't have their stuff now. And it wasn't like we were the only college moving students off campus on short notice. But there was plenty of opinion on how inconvenienced they felt. Yeah, get at the back of the line, kid. We are all inconvenienced. From the person trying to buy groceries, to the person in the unemployment line, down to the loved ones not able to be by the bedside of their dying loved ones. We are all doing the best we can. If you can't see that, you are seriously lacking in humanity, and no amount of money or in-person classes can fix that.

+1  Also so much whining about losing out on traditional commencement -- high school and college levels.  Disappointing, yes.  As bad as lots of other COVID burdens and misery people are enduring?  Not even close.

Having to deal with an historic-level pandemic situation is going to be a rough wake-up call to maturity.  As disappointing as it is that so many of the students are no farther along in the maturing process than they are already, I don't envy them having to face all of this at their stage of life.

[mahagonny]

Having to deal with an historic-level pandemic situation is going to be a rough wake-up call to maturity.  As disappointing as it is that so many of the students are no farther along in the maturing process than they are already, I don't envy them having to face all of this at their stage of life.

How the greatest generation became great.

[Caracal]

CSU goes to on-line in Fall.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-cal-state-university-system-moves-toward-virtual-learning-for-fall-2020/

It's gonna be a take it or leave it proposition.

Let's see what happens.

It is a weird and complicated decision to have to make. The problem is that you're trying to understand what the situation will be like in four months in the face of an evolving, and impossible to predict, crisis. Deciding to move everything online in the Fall is an irreversible decision. The other decision, to announce the intention to have in person classes is reversible, but comes with its own costs. My University has announced that the plan is to open, and they've started working on a plan.

I worry mostly that we aren't going to get any clear answers on what the trigger is for additional decisions. What sort of local spike in cases would trigger us to move online before or during the semester? What about transmission linked to the school? I worry that without clearly communicated protocols you could have a lot of panic among faculty and students.

The problem with assuming you'll be in person, and waiting to see if you'll need to be online, is that it delays prepping for the latter. I do labs for several courses, so virtualizing those is a LOT of work; I have to be on that already because if the university waits until July to decide we're going to be online it would be a nightmare to try and get everything done starting then. (If things got a lot better so that face to face was possible, it would be much easier to "switch" to the old way in that scenario.)

From the standpoint of professors, you're right, but not from the larger standpoint of the school. My school is rolling out their plan for classes in the fall, and there are an enormous number of moving parts. How can you ensure adequate space in classrooms? Some faculty and students are going to need to be online, but you have to figure out how to match up those needs. That's before you get into dealing with dorms and student life. All that planning has to happen now. You couldn't just wake up in late July and decide, "oh, actually things seem fine, lets do in person classes."

[dr_codex]

Here's an article that discusses a lot of these issues:
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/09/as-elite-colleges-go-remote-students-revolt-against-the-state-of-higher-ed/

A sample from the article:

These lawsuits reveal very different arguments about what the value of a college degree is. One claim is that "the value of any degree issued on the basis of online or pass/fail classes will be diminished." This claim rests on the idea of job-market signaling in economics, in which the value of a degree comes from the positive signal that it communicates to an employer—for example, tenacity in sticking it out to obtain that education credential, or intrinsic intelligence in navigating the college maze.

Yeah.

The present predicament affects everybody, not just a  college or two. Hence, the move to on-line will penalize [or not] everybody equally. Thus, relative prestige remains unaffected, and that is what signalling is all about, relative position. And colleges have made sure that GPA's remain unaffected, so that such signalling also remains unchanged.

More tangibly, what is impaired by going on-line is the consumption experience. No sports. No booze ups. No goofing off.  I doubt anybody would sue on these grounds, though. :-)

Thus, I believe the present pandemic will have a near zero permanent affect on higher education. The sector will get smaller, but that has been trend. Nothing to do with the virus.

CSU goes to on-line in Fall.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-cal-state-university-system-moves-toward-virtual-learning-for-fall-2020/

It's gonna be a take it or leave it proposition.

Let's see what happens.

As the article notes, there will be "limited exceptions". I've already heard through the grapevine about one campus, and I expect there will be others.

In Canada, Memorial University made a similar announcement: blanket rule with petitions for exceptions: https://www.mun.ca/covid19/news.php?id=13316&type=news

I suspect that this pattern will become the new normal.

[kaysixteen]

Random thoughts:

1)WRT refunds for stuff bought but not received, who really thinks that Uni X can toss Kid out of dorm, and dining hall, when kid has paid for these things, and not give him his money back, irrespective of why Uni had to do this?   And this is a classist problem here, as, like it or not, many college kids who had paid for these things, plus, of course, the accompanying access to ftf classes there, are really not equipped to become online students living and eating elsewhere (esp if they did not get a r-and-b refund to potentially use to secure alternative living and eating arrangements).  Some kids would in any case, even if they can move back in on short notice with parents, not have computer a/o online access to even potentially participate at all, let alone just effectively, in online classes, something that they emphatically did not sign up for. 
2) Giving refunds for ftf classes that suddenly morphed into online ones is more dicey, however, a) like it or not, some classes so converted just will not be anything resembling the same in ed quality, some so deficient therein as to really make them insufficient on the face of things, and not legitimately worthy of being given academic credit for said course-- indeed, some of these will simply not have been able to provide the student the minimum amount of course content, effectively taught, practiced, and evaluated, to justify the students' being assessed as having taken the class, esp if it is in a professional program, and it will be even dangerous for society to allow that to be done.  Indeed, some such students will probably end up having to repeat classes and/or take more time than would otherwise have been expected to complete their degree programs, and they should not have to be the ones to pay for that extra time (BTW, this is also essentially going to happen to thousands, if not millions, of k12 kids who are just not getting anything resembling the sort of eductations this spring that they would have been able to get sans coronavirus, and society is more or less ignoring this reality/ hoping it will go away/ engaging in classist, my kid is not in this situation, etc., magical thinking.)  b) bad faith is really not the issue-- in what other context in our law, does someone who takes money to give a person x, and then fails to provide x, *irrespective of the reason why x was not delivered*, get to keep the customer's money?  If I lay down fifteen bucks to see the 7:30 showing of Rambo XXVII at the local cineplex, and said odeon does not actually let me see said epic at that time, it has to give me my money back.
3)We will have to consider, further, another related thing that has reared its ugly head in this case, namely, that the enormously expensive product known as a college course is more often than it should be not really worth what it is charged for,  in the sense that the course product itself is not really, even if operated exactly as the uni catalog states, really an adequate academic treatment of the supposed course content, even if the student gets an A and does everything exactly the way the professor dictates.  There are, IOW, many courses and even whole degree programs, heck even some whole colleges, that are more or less fraudulent in many cases, and this  does not even include the mostly largely fraudulent online colleges and online programs attached to brick-and-mortar schools (who among us, for instance, would ever hire a person with an online 'PhD' for a professor position, essentially in any field whatsoever?)  We do not really have to like this, indeed, we really should not like it, but to deny it is disingenuous and professional malpractice. 

[Aster]

This will be The Big Year for both local community colleges and predatory online for-profit institutions, that's for dang sure.

And the 1-3 years *after that* will be known as "The Great Course Retakening", "The Matriculation Crisis", or the beginning of the "Seven Year Bachelor's Degree Era". Hee hee.

Lawyers gotta eat too.

[kaysixteen]

One more thing-- even *when* a school could refuse a refund, in many/ most cases, the optics of doing so, esp when the kid is, say, a minority first-gen college kid who is trying to work his way through school, are likely to be really, really bad (and all the more so if the school is not some Super Dinky-esque school that was circling the drain before the Coronacrisis).  Consider the current discussions between the MLB owners (full of greedy scumbags and lesser rascals, for the *most part*), and the enormously powerful players' union, regarding when and how, and on what financial terms, to reopen the sport-- no one seriously thinks players will or should get full pay for 162 games, when many fewer will end up being played, and those that will be played likely be played sans fans, meaning no tickets, wieners, and brewskis sold, etc.), but the union is apparently playing pretty strong hardball (no pun intended) as yet.  Anyone who knows the history of the conflicts between said union and the aforementioned set of mostly dirtbag owners (think Miami Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates, Baltimore Orioles, etc) is likely to have generally adopted a mostly strongly pro-players attitude in any such conflicts, *before now*, but if the players overreach here, well...

[dr_codex]

This will be The Big Year for both local community colleges and predatory online for-profit institutions, that's for dang sure.

And the 1-3 years *after that* will be known as "The Great Course Retakening", "The Matriculation Crisis", or the beginning of the "Seven Year Bachelor's Degree Era". Hee hee.

Lawyers gotta eat too.

I said something very similar to my Chair and to my Academic Dean, and they passed it up the line to the Provost. We should be reducing the numbers in online, writing-intensive courses. But we are not, mostly because of financial distress. Many of those students will fail, retaking in the Spring. Assuming that they come back at all. I'm not going to push (I like my job), but I'm going to make sure that it gets on the agenda of the next assessment, enrollment management, and retention meetings.

Random responses to various posts:

Those of you saying that full and immediate reimbursements for services not provided might want to get on the phone with an airline, a hotel, or a major sports franchise. Even pre-paid insurance doesn't cover everything, and many industries are trying flexible repayments. I think my college went with credit applied towards future housing & meal plans; whether or not some people ever can collect is another matter, but you can see the logic: sunk costs might be a consideration for people who might otherwise jump ship. Also, I'm not sure how our contract with our major food service company works, and what we might have been able to claw back. I'm also not super interested in them laying off a lot of their staff -- I like them, and they work really hard.

I have public school age kids, live in the suburbs, and have a Facebook account. People absolutely are calling for property tax refunds, as well as many other concessions. As Kay and others have pointed out, one penny that has dropped is the recognition that schools do a lot more than lesson plans. (The Mayor of NYC made this argument, probably longer than he should have in the face of a pandemic; he was right on the principle if not the limit case.) I can set up ABC Mouse or Khan Academy videos myself; what I cannot do is replicate table talk or an impromptu game of Calvin Ball. Persistent squawking has increased the number of Google Chatroom sessions, but the people complaining won't be satisfied, because it cannot address their real concerns. One of them is my point above -- class sizes are too big for this kind of delivery, which is why the Privates (more resources, fewer students) look like they're doing a better job.

One thing that many Colleges and Universities are going to resist, hard, is the premise that online/distance course delivery is inferior to face-to-face instruction. I've sat on our Curriculum Committee for years, and one thing that we refuse to write into any catalog description is the method of delivery, unless the course is so specific that it can only be taught one way. (Study abroad, specific labs, or another specific location.) The reason is that we've argued for decades to our accreditors that the content and learning outcomes are identical in any method of course delivery, which affects both our internal courses and those transferred across a much larger system. Any intimation that this axiom is false is going to ripple out, potentially bringing down the whole curricular edifice. Some institutions may move the other way, refusing to offer or give credit for online courses; they are going to have a challenging fall, but will remain as niche residential experience places if and when such things are possible.

[marshwiggle]

  If I lay down fifteen bucks to see the 7:30 showing of Rambo XXVII at the local cineplex, and said odeon does not actually let me see said epic at that time, it has to give me my money back.

To be fair, part of this is just good business. Assuming the average moviegoer will see several in a year, it's in the theatre's best interest to refund so the person comes back.  In the case of post-secondary education, typically a person only does it once, so it's not so comparable.

One other factor is that for people who started the academic year last Fall, and the lockdown affected maybe 25% of the Winter term, then at most that works out to about a 12.5% refund.

Forgoing the potential revenue in the Fall with everything virtual is a much bigger deal.

[RatGuy]

Some of my colleagues are trying to get a partial refund on their $375 parking tags. I think their endeavor will be less successful than similar attempts to get refunds for campus gym memberships.

[bio-nonymous]

I just don't understand how everything can be online. Sure, lecture, writing intensive, and discussion based-classes can be adopted. But how do you replicate organic chemistry lab at home? How can you replicate a biochemistry lab--people don't have PCR machines, biosafety hoods, and Western Blot imagers in their spare bedroom. How do you replicate studio experiences for the arts,  internships, or research experience in labs? Some things have got to be in person and you cannot delay them indefinitely because people need to graduate and some things are sequential. Here at large middling public U we are doing distance learning where possible, some exceptions where needed, and splitting the fall and spring semesters into 2 8-week terms (in case of a new lock down, I guess), with some exceptions to the 8-week as well--with lots of exceptions in graduate and professional programs. Of course the information we are getting is haphazard and continually changing.

If I were a student going into a lab science or health care field without real actual in-person lab instruction, I would feel a bit cheated. For example, new health professional students here starting this summer are now taking gross anatomy as a virtual class. TO me this does not prepare our future doctors and other health care professionals as well as actual interaction with the cadavers--so are they being cheated, is the public being cheated? BUT, we all are being cheated out of a normal life experience right now by the covid19. It is a new paradigm with few answers, it seems.