BYU being sued for "online" curriculum not being what was paid for

[_Physics Guy]

If the lawyers sense they will not be paid, the lawsuit will end abruptly.

I felt a large disturbance in the fees.

[_Kishkumen]

If I recall correctly, LDS leadership didn’t close their temples until a worker, in temple on a Wednesday or Thursday, became Utah’s first COVID death the following Sunday. Hopefully, they are more proactive now, rather than just reactive. Bednar’s rant about how being forced to close churches violates his religious rights, however, doesn’t spark confidence.

Does anyone know what kind of precautions they were taking before they closed? Social distancing? Masks? Did they go from taking no precautions to closing?

[_Dr Moore]

What a stupid frivolous lawsuit.

[_Kishkumen]

What a stupid frivolous lawsuit.

I trust your opinion on that.

[_Dr Moore]

I wonder if one of these class action attorneys has done the math, so to speak, and spread the word that there is gold in these hills. Assessing fixed and variable costs, someone must believe there is a non trivial cost gap between in person and online, that that gap won’t be disgorged voluntarily by universities but will be relieved by litigation.

Now I think it’s stupid and frivolous to go after BYU, a university that already gives students a something like 80% tuition scholarship, and is generally recognized as the highest value for the money in a top 100 US university. That seems a bad place to start setting legal precedent on this question.

Other suits with possible class action designations: Yale, Kent State, Temple, Syracuse, BYU, are a few that come up on Google News searches within the past 4 days.

Law firms generally don’t pursue class actions without a plan that involves money coming into their tills. I think someone did the math and has figured that it costs less to deliver college online, that University endowments exist for just such a rainy day, and that excess tuition money will eventually be court mandated back to students.

The numbers would be massive for even one school. Without being too exact, say the suit relieves students at UniversityXYZ of $10k in tuition. Student body 15,000. That is a $150 million potential settlement. A 10-30% cut is $15-45 million to the litigating attorneys. Not bad. And that is just one school.

So start by demanding the world, describe a huge gap in cost and amplify that with claims of worse educational quality, and hope to settle on a number that fills some or most of the stated economic gap. This makes the BYU case make sense from an attorney risk point of view.

But again, why start with BYU? You’re dead at square one when the numbers come out. BYU just says: well it costs $35k per student normally, and say it’s $25k online. Ok, we charge $7k. Case closed.

If any of you with direct exposure to university finances, I think the critical piece of analysis here is fixed vs variable operating costs.