Covid claims against unis

[UniTO]

This isn't going to affect my institution as we were one of the few doing in person lectures for a fair chunk of the pandemic and I do know some stayed online longer than they should have done but can't help thinking this is going to break some institutions.

The students claiming uni Covid compensation 'for the principle' - BBC News https://share.google/zeZ5tzk6CrZuKQVGp

I know government schemes were helping the economy out but the amount of fraud that went on (PPE scandals etc) ...there could have been a governmental intervention to reduce student fees perhaps?

Some of the comments in that article are hard to take. The girl stuck at her grandparents house with no WiFi .. that's not the university's fault. Maybe she should have withdrawn and returned later. I am a lecturer who has ended up with long term health issues from the pandemic. It was extremely difficult..I caught covid at least once from students who didn't test, who were (understandably) mixing and doing the things young people do.

I sympathise with students but it was shit for everyone. I don't know that unis should bear the cost of refunds here. What do you think?

All students had the option of interrupting They didn’t want to. What a ridiculous idea. Think further down the line - no medicine graduates at all for a year or two. No postgrad intakes for a couple of years. Hundreds of thousands of students doing nothing but claim benefits.

Absolutely correct. Some unis took way way longer than others to get back to in person teaching - which is what was students signed up in anticipation of and didn’t receive in many cases. So not a case of ‘it was against the law’ for the entire duration…

I don't mean individual students interrupting, I mean institutions. There should have been a mechanism like furlough where unis were allowed to say "we can't put on this particular course in person this year and give anything like the same experience to students, we are pausing it." And be funded to do so and not go bankrupt. Not every course would have needed it but for the ones with a large practical hands on element it would have made far more sense.

Yes, it would have been disruptive to postpone graudation for some students - but more disruptive than shoving them out into the world effectively under qualified? More disruptive than giving them and their lecturers totally inadequate support leading to worse than expected grades, cheating scandals, thousands of young people suffering, some leaving courses without taking a degree at all, etc? Or forcing individual students to make the expensive decision to interrupt? I'm not so sure.

Covid was disruptive in lots of ways, it was a generational shitshow that continues to effect people's lives and will do years later. The question is who has had to bear the brunt of the impact. I don't think it's fair to young people who studied during the pandemic to treat them as if everything was business as usual for them. Often their parents were 'just sitting at home claiming benefits' on furlough from their own workplaces at the same time. Why should they get more grace than their children?

Within my daughter’s year it varied a lot. Some courses returned in the spring/early summer and others didn’t - in one case because the head of the course lived quite far away and students were hacked off that this set a precedent for other teaching staff. One had moved to spain and said that they couldn’t get accom in the uni city. It will be in the nuance and how much time and money young people can afford to pursue this

I am definitely aware that there were universities which didn't try very hard to get on board with teaching online and those students had a crap time. Then again, we all had a crap time, since it was a pandemic, after all. At mine, we were in as much as they could make us within the laws as they stood. Teaching the same session three times in a row to socially distanced students in masks was a horrible experience, and although initially students said they wanted to be on campus, as soon as the tiers came in, most just went home. So we'd be teaching the same session three times in a row, but to maybe two or three students in each. We weren't allowed to offer those sessions online, because "we" (not the academics, though) were "committed to in-person teaching". It was tough work.

I do understand the frustration from students at universities which didn't get back on campus quickly enough, but it annoys me when they talk about 'the experience I paid for' - we don't and can't deliver an 'experience'; we deliver education and we did so as best we could within the rules at the time. We can't be responsible for everyone's good time as well!

I do agree that we didn't get back on campus as quickly as we could have done. Even when it was legal to be back f2f we were told only do 60% of sessions f2f and the rest online as they didn't want too many people on campus at the same time. Not sure if they were worried about staff getting sick and then there being nobody to teach the students.. I did have a colleague who died from covid right at the start.

Saying that some students moaned no end when they had to come in....they still do to be honest. Only yesterday I was asked if I could move 2 of my sessions (different days) online as they don't want to come in for 3 hours!!!!!!!!!! I said no. But I know a number of hem/half the cohort won't turn up!

And I think if the universities had shut down and had to refund everything they would have gone bust. Which wouldn't have done the students any favours. They refunded accommodation fees as it was and lost a load of money due to that.

If they had refunded/paused tuition fees as well they wouldn;t have been able to pay staff (guess maybe furlough would have been used), pay rent, pay utility bills. repair bills, make loan repayments

They are not asking for full refunds, they are saying they should have been charged the tuition fees for online degrees rather than residential degrees. I think that's quite fair. It's not denigrating all the work people did, it's recognising that an online education is not the same (which universities themselves acknowledge by making online tuition lower).

Right but do they then think that their lecturers should have received less pay? Even though we were working harder, if anything? What is a 'residential degree' anyway - given that halls of residence did issue refunds when they closed, what's the bit they want back?

It would need to focus on practical elements eg If chemistry labs, music studios etc were not being used, there was a potential cost saving there. Not so for say English lectures to large groups that moved online.

at our university online lecturers are paid the same as in-person staff?

Er no, no one has said that?

At my university we get paid the same for online and in person teaching, quite a few of us do a mixture of both.

Residential just means on campus, sorry not everyone uses that so didn't mean to mislead. It doesn't refer to halls.

As a parent with two in higher education, I’m glad this is happening. The circumstances for one of my children was that the staff were on strike right before Covid, no classes of any kind, nothing being taught and then into Covid. She hardly had any education for her school fees, which she’s paying off.

the second of my children cannot claim as part of this as it was a masters in drama. Try doing an acting course and performance where students usually get picked up for movies/theatre and agents - nothing happened. At least this school was quick to get them on line but it was not the same. No one in her year got work. Totally not the norm. Thousands upon thousands wasted on tuition she didn’t really get.

Plain as day, the kids did not get what they paid for.

No, I don't think I expressed myself very well there, sorry. I guess what I'm driving at is, it's not as though the universities saved money as a result of Covid, so where does the money come from? What they got wasn't as nice, but it was just as expensive for the institutions.

With strikes, the universities do save money because they aren't paying the staff, of course, so I think that's a fairer claim.

Surely the online courses such as the Open University are cheaper as there’s less overheads, no physical buildings to heat or rent or buy, no physical library books to buy, no estates department, no security staff, cleaning staff, maintenance staff, repair bills, no tables and chairs to buy, no electronic equipment to buy.

So Open University students aren’t paying for that…..it’s not that the actual teaching is cheaper, there’s just less associated costs.

This would never be an issue if uni education was free so it’s now a business and needs to be treated as such.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just when people compare the temporary emergency arrangements of universities other than the OU, to the OU, which is set up that way, it's not helpful - because they do have all of those things, whether they're able to use them to full potential in the moment or not.

I agree. I work in a university too and saw my colleagues work themselves into the ground creating and implementing a whole new set of online teaching and assessment systems. And they were faced with a barrage of complaints for not somehow making all of it easy for all the students. It was a horrendous, stressful time, and if course loads of staff were getting sick as well. Plus there was a perception that those of us who had to transition to WFH were just loafing around and not working, when we were actually working more hours than ever, with tight deadlines and wall to wall Teams meetings. We all worked extremely hard to keep the teaching and research going as much as humanly possible.

Going after universities for money for not providing something they legally weren't allowed to provide is madness. And hitting universities financially will just damage HE provision and the student experience for future students.

I can see both sides to a point but this is where the whole "unis are a business" unravels. Retail and hospitality (actual business) had it v v hard but there were schemes and loans for businesses. Unis aren't really businesses. They offer tuition for a set fee which they do not set. Hands are tied by government. Generally, fees don't meet costs anyway. They didn't get loans or other money. They were allowed to furlough staff but not teaching staff so it was limited. Add to that the fact that it's a loan company who is the middle man. Who is liable for the refund? Unis themselves or the government/SFE or a mix of the two?

There is a case perhaps to answer but there's so much nuance here.

Some unis were online too long.

Some students don't attend classes in person and didn't attend online, so is it fair for them to claim?

Some went to uni in the middle of the pandemic because they didn't know what else to do, knowing it was uncertain. Buyer beware...if we want to go down the customer/business route?

In the article I shared some of the examples were ridiculous.

Did everyone get a refund for everything that was lost and messed up during the pandemic? I doubt it.

Whilst I agree, an awful lot of students like my son at Birbeck were delivered a pretty meagre offering online with little support and to add insult to injury they had been on strike for several months before hand too . All of which the students were paying for the privilege of - so not only where they getting a limited delivered offering- they ended up paying rather a lot , for the privilege - My son ended up giving up in May 21 after a pretty substandard experience from January 2020 and ended up really depressed about it too - and yes I think they should get a years refund back to their student loan accounts - however in all fairness, I don’t think this is something the unis should have to pay, I think this should have been done more like furlough and students paid a set amount off their loans

I started a masters before Covid that continued throughout lockdown. Same price for the 3 years as it would have been 1 year full time and no discount when we moved to fully online learning.

We were told that we could visit lecturers on campus when we needed to for help, have access to the uni library for studying and our dissertation materials. We were also told the uni would help us find businesses to work with to complete this.

When lockdown happened the teaching staff went AWOL. No replies for weeks, complaints also ignored. We were told to find our own dissertation projects in the end. No access to the library to study.

At no point were we offered to pay less as very obviously not getting the full uni experience. We had no in person seminars, no in person contact, we moved to fully remote for year 3. I had no desire to do freshers week but access to the sports facilities would have been brilliant.

I graduated in person a year after the course finished (had to pay quite a bit for that too)

Did I get what I paid for? No.

I’m off to read the news reports, I think students have a point.

Well they did save quite a bit of money on the facilities side, not having to pay for energy and heat and security and janitorial, but beyond that the government should have made up the difference. They bailed out plenty of other sectors.

The comparison isn't to Open University. Many of the universities being sued offer both on campus and online degrees, the latter are often about 20 or 30% cheaper. The argument is when they switched to online they should have switched them to the online tuition fees.

I’m surprised there’s no “act of god” type policy in the university’s insurance?

I also wonder if this would pave the way for claims against private schools 🤔

Why do you think they saved a lot on the facility costs? They still needed security etc, and cleaning costs went up a lot as things re-opened. Empty buildings needed to be checked - and in some cases extra work, such as legionella flushing etc needed. Not all buildings were empty anyway - some research still went on. Halls of residence still had occupants, as quite a number of students couldn’t go home, not just the internationals (and quite a surprising number of other students came back as it was better than being locked down at home), and staff had to support them. Very little savings made there, while most refunded hall fees, so the residential accounts went into deficit. Facilities staff still had to be paid. And while yes services such as catering weren’t needed, the income went as well.