A federal judge has torpedoed a bid by a group of Loyola University students, and parents of students, to sue the Chicago Catholic university for switching them to online instruction after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but still pocketing the bigger tuition bills they had paid for traditional, live classroom learning.
On Jan. 25, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Gettleman tossed the class action lawsuit against Loyola University of Chicago.
In his ruling, Gettleman said the students cannot show the university owed them live instruction under any kind of contract, despite the larger tuition and fees they paid, compared to the costs charged by Loyola to its regular online students.
Elizabeth Fegan
| Fegan Scott
“Plaintiffs also argue that in-person instruction was implied by the difference in tuition for the ‘in-person’ and ‘online-program,’” Gettleman wrote in his opinion. “They ask the court to infer that the difference in tuitions and fees reflects a guaranteed right to on-campus services and ‘face-to-face, live instruction.’ The court will not make this inference.
“Under the caselaw, plaintiffs are required to provide an identifiable contractual promise.
“A difference in tuition is insufficient to allege a specific contractual promise,” Gettleman wrote.
The judge also ruled parents of college students cannot sue the university at all, because all they did was pay bills on behalf of students over the age of 18.
Attorney Elizabeth A. Fegan, of the firm of Fegan Scott LLC, of Chicago, with attorneys Shanon J. Carson, Ellen T. Noteware and E. Michelle Drake, of the firm of Berger Montague P.C., of Philadelphia, filed the suit against Loyola in Chicago federal court in late May 2020.
They were later joined by other named plaintiffs, including Loyola sophomore Isabel Bottello, of Itasca;; senior Kari Whalen, of Morris; and Joseph Hickey, of Orland Park, whose daughter was a senior at Loyola during the last school year.
All of the plaintiffs asserted they paid Loyola between $14,000 and $23,000 in tuition and fees to attend in-person instruction and participate in campus life at Loyola’s campus on Chicago’s North Side during the 2020 spring semester.
Further, Whalen asserted she held a job on campus, which was her lone source of income.
However, after Gov. JB Pritzker declared a statewide disaster in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the university shut down in-person instruction and campus activities, and then, a week later, ordered nearly all students to leave campus and closed nearly all buildings on campus.
The complaint said Loyola then transitioned all instruction online.
The university has offered a “fraction” of its regular courses to online students, the complaint said, at sharply reduced rates compared to standard tuition.
The complaint noted traditional students were charged between $1,050-$1,838 per credit hour, for an average total of $22,000 per semester. By contrast, online students were charged $693 per credit, as well as charged hundreds of dollars less per semester in fees.
“… Unlike students enrolled in Online Learning at Loyola, (the plaintiffs) contracted with Defendant specifically for courses that would be delivered 100% on-campus, and for the many in-person resources and services that go along with them,” the complaint said.
However, despite the abrupt and unprecedented changes to the nature of their college instruction, the complaint asserted Loyola refused to offer any refunds to traditional students forced online, including of the so-called residency fees paid specifically by students for access to campus services, activities and events.
Further, Whalen said she lost her job.
This decision stood even after the university received at least $10 million in federal COVID-related aid, most of which was supposed to be designated to student aid, the complaint said.
The plaintiffs further noted Loyola maintained an endowment of more than $800 million.
The complaint asked the court to order Loyola to refund students at least a portion of the tuition they had been charged for the 2020 spring semester. The complaint sought to expand the lawsuit to include a class of many of Loyola’s 17,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
“While Plaintiffs recognize that, in closing its physical campuses and shifting all instruction to online, Defendant likely took measures it deemed necessary to protect public health, the fact remains that the education and services that Defendant provided to students for the second half of the Spring 2020 semester were not that which Plaintiffs and the Class registered, bargained, and paid,” the complaint said.
Loyola, however, argued the students and parents had no legal leg to stand on.
Paying tuition, the university said, is not the same as entering into a legal contract with the university for instruction – or at least, for the kind of in-person instruction students may believe they have the right to receive in exchange for their tuition.
“While in-person instruction and on-campus services may have been Plaintiffs’ expectation, nowhere were they guaranteed,” Loyola said in its motion to dismiss.
Judge Gettleman agreed, saying the plaintiffs merely challenged the “quality of the instruction” they received, “not whether defendant (Loyola) provided education ‘at all.’”
The judge said this, then, represented a lawsuit over “educational malpractice,” a kind of legal claim “courts throughout the country, have rejected.”
While plaintiffs pointed to Loyola’s marketing campaigns and “hundreds of pages of documents that describe course offerings and residential life at Loyola” to back their claims that Loyola violated their end of the bargain, the judge said those publications are not the same as a contract.
He noted, for instance, that Loyola’s Course Catalog, which includes listing for classes that were described as “lecture (in-person),” also includes language indicating the course listings and structure could be altered “at any time, without notice.”
Finally, Gettleman said federal precedent has declared that parents who have paid tuition on behalf of their otherwise-grown children cannot use those tuition payments to assert a contractual relationship with a college.
The judge tossed Gociman and Hickey from the lawsuit, and dismissed the students’ remaining legal claims, with prejudice, meaning they are not permitted to attempt to revive their lawsuit, except on appeal.
Loyola has been represented in the action by attorney Monica H. Khetarpal, and others with the firm of Jackson Lewis P.C., of Chicago.