Yale University unfairly enriched itself by failing to issue a partial refund to students who ended the spring semester with online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Student Jonathan Michel feels cheated because he paid for the full Yale experience, which he didn’t get. Others are suing Cal State, UConn, Cornell, Columbia, Fordham, Pace, the University of California and others. What do colleges and universities really sell? Is it just credits and diplomas? Is Zoom Yale still Yale? If so, why do some cost so much more than others? And should tax payers have to fund ‘the college experience’ via federal education loans and grants?
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Bill Whittle Network · COVID-19 Class Action: Student Wants Refund, Feels Cheated by 'Zoom Yale'
14 replies on “COVID-19 Class Action: Student Wants Refund, Feels Cheated by ‘Zoom Yale’”
I don’t know Yale, but I know universities. Big parts of what you pay for are the name and to a lesser extent contacts. That’s interesting because it’s all intangible. Do Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Georgetown charge 17 times what the University of American Samoa costs? If so, how do they justify their fees and how do they sell their college to prospective students? In truth, everyone knows what you are buying at an Ivy League college, but it’s hard to quantify. Also hard to answer is Bill’s rhetorical question: how about a shy student who chooses to go to the library every day for 4 years and doesn’t ever get to know anyone?
I’m not sure, but if I were hiring, I’d think long and hard about hiring someone from an Ivy League school. “I went to Yale” has lost a lot of its value.
Fox news discussed this this morning and mentioned that Yale has an endowment of over 30 billion dollars. The interest on that alone for one year would pay all of thier students room & board and class fees.
“Hey Grandpa, what’s an ashtray?”
No, kids today should be asking, “Hey grandpa, what’s an education?” Unfortunately, their Dunning-Kruger “educations” won’t have provided them with the tools to be able to even imagine that question.
bonus for Dunning-Kruger reference
Is it possible that the ivy league schools are nothing but expensive diploma mills? Isn’t that true for almost all “higher” education? Might as well buy your diplomas/degrees on line and cut out the middle men.
Looks like it to me.
Makes Mike Rowe look real good.
Bill, you are defending the immature college students’ attitude that it is a piece of paper one gets based on paying for classes one is required to take that is what is being paid for. If that were the case, the higher education system would have collapsed at a faster rate than it has. It is the knowledge and skills you learn that leads to a productive life career that is being paid for, not the piece of paper. The piece of paper merely attested to the knowledge and skills you now possess as a result of the classes one successfully passed.
The reason some schools were preferred is that the quality of their instruction, rigor of their selection of both faculty and students and the resulting superior performance of their graduates justified their high regard. What was one paying for? It’s the Yale knowledge and skills one sought. Forget the country club amenities. Yale isn’t known for any of that. USC, Notra Dame, Florida, Texas A&M are known for these things as well as a solid academic education.
The quality of the education one gets at these top tier and second tier universities is highly correlated to faculty/student in class interaction. I have taught at the Military Academy, Texas A&M and Blinn College. I have taught using Zoom. There is no comparison between Zoom and in person teaching and learning.
As you have correctly pointed out, higher education has been trading on its previously earned excellence as academic standards have greatly slipped in non-STEM fields. This may well be why students typically focus on the credit toward the degree rather than the knowledge they need to receive to avoid selling shoes at a Nike outlet with their ethnic studies degree.
Yale, Harvard and the like are only able to maintain their top tier reputations (which are in fact slipping in the past couple of decades) because of our obsession with credentials rather than knowledge and skills. A bad substitute. You will recall that Trump told the national government recently to focus on skills rather than degrees in hiring.
I believe students deserve a partial refund for their tuition and fees based on the reduction of the educational value of distance learning that did and will occur. Students are voting with their feet and taking the fall semester off based on the continuing closure of contact classes. I have heard rumors of enrollments falling in the double digits.
I’m torn on this one. I mostly agree with Bill but at the same time, it seems to me that the value of a Yale education is focused not on amenities or class sizes but on the people you will meet, your fellow students. It’s the idea that you’re meeting the future movers and shakers–who are most of them related to the current movers and shakers–that makes it valuable. You can’t get that via Zoom, even if you limit Zoom sessions to a dozen people.
I think though that the “movers and shakers” idea is mostly done. The type of student who was a typical Yale undergrad in 1950 probably makes up less than 20% of the current student population, maybe even less. The student body is much more diverse, not to mention larger, than it was in 1970, or 1950. They want you to think that this is their strength. At some level they may be right, but in the meantime they’ve destroyed the qualities of their student body that made Yale valuable compared to a big state school. What are the chances today that someone in your English Lit 101 class is a future senator or federal judge or cabinet member compared to in 1950? This of course has nothing to do with Covid-19. I would argue that no student at Yale has gotten what they thought they were getting for at least 40 years.
All that said, I wonder if the Skull & Bones Society is still holding meetings and initiations during the shutdown. 🙂
I’m probably as torn as Laura on this too. I would say the top schools sell the Opportunity to make those social connections, but the rigor of academics has certainly fallen off and the caliber of the faculty just does not hold the value with the last several years of social justice preening and utter lack of any tenured professors standing up and calling their leadership morons.
With the focus on having a diverse campus and the lowering of standards of tests for admittance, I would argue that the Skull and Bones type societies as Laura points out have probably moved their operations off campus and are doing networking though other means now. Probably more people are connecting through vacations at Davos and other rich people parties (Epstein’s island, or some more legit connector) so that Americans and Europeans with similar mindsets can still meet and mingle. Some high achieving inner city token minority won’t fit in with the legacy and scion students.
There are probably far better facilities and advisors and resources available to the students at the better schools that won’t be available via Zoom, so that much of a reduction in fees and refund of such would make some sense, but that’s also a “you may use up to this much” kind of thing the internet services lay on you when you ask for a discount because your service was out during a construction cut.
There are some degrees that cannot be done remotely. Try getting a Medical doctor degree without hospital experience. My degree, Chemical Engineering, required operating a processing unit at the college. Some things require physical contact. (also we were required to work co-op, which in Chemical Engineering meant working at a Chemical plant)
My aerospace degrees as well. Lots of lab work. However, the way some profs taught from their slides, some classes could easily have been remote.
Others it was all discussion. Almost never about politics or SJW-ism. But I am a dinosaur and clearly no nothing about the world in which I live anymore. 😉
I heard the first complaints of this when a student was hoping for a refund of fees paid for the dormitory. Since they most definitely did not get to use that aspect, and it is a separate fee, why couldn’t that part be refunded?
Couple quick points:
The retroactive request for a refund will go nowhere, as the schools did not make the decision to shut down on campus activities; the state and local governments did.
The forward look for reduction in tuition and fees should absolutely happen. I can say for us, my daughter’s bill for this semester is about 6.5% less. Considering the last decade was 3-4% increase each year, that is a big reduction.
Furthermore, the number of conversations with her friends that talk about government overreach lightens my heart. We are going to have a very confused bunch of college grads in the next few years who think they ought to think that socialism is awesome, but also got a taste of what dictatorship is. Should be interesting.