Class Actions Against Universities

Some things a school does to you, it did to everyone.

A discount it promised and then withdrew. A rotation year it could not staff. A programme that lost accreditation while you were paying for it. A fee collected for something that did not exist. When the harm came from a uniform decision applied to a whole cohort, the individual appeal is the wrong instrument — you are not asking the school to reconsider your file, you are asking a court to rule on a policy.

That is what a class action is for, and it is also why most student cases are not one. This page is about telling the difference before anyone spends a year finding out.

The test that decides everything

Ask whether your damages can be worked out the same way as everybody else’s.

If the answer requires looking at your transcript, your accommodation file, your hearing record, or what your particular dean said in a particular meeting, it is an individual case. Bring it as one. It will move faster and you will keep control of it.

If the answer is a line in a contract, a published fee, a policy that ran the same way for everyone in the programme, or a service the school sold and did not deliver — that is a class question, and courts are equipped to answer it once for everyone.

The fact patterns that actually work

A promised price that changed. A tuition discount, a locked rate, a residency-based reduction, a scholarship formula published in the catalogue and then withdrawn. The promise is documentary, it was made to everyone in the class, and the loss is arithmetic.

A programme that could not deliver the curriculum. Clinical rotations the school did not have places for. A campus opened without the sites to support it. Required experiences students had to find themselves. This is one of the strongest patterns in professional education because the shortfall is institutional, documented in accreditation filings, and identical for everyone in the cohort.

Accreditation trouble. A programme that lost accreditation, was placed on probation, or was marketed as leading to a licence it could not lead to. Students pay for a credential, not for the classroom hours.

Fees for services not provided. Facility, activity, health, technology and laboratory fees collected for access nobody had. The COVID-era litigation was largely this, and it produced most of the law now used in student class actions.

A policy applied uniformly and unlawfully. A remediation or progression rule run the same way against every student it touched. A blanket accommodation practice. A recruiting pitch built on figures that were not accurate.

What Rule 23 requires, and where student cases die

Certification is the whole fight. A class action that is not certified is an individual case with a very expensive first two years, so the honest analysis happens at the beginning.

Commonality and typicality. The named plaintiffs have to be positioned like everyone else. Where a uniform campus closure hit every student the same way, courts have found commonality straightforwardly. Where the named plaintiffs came from two of seventeen constituent colleges and federal relief credits had been applied unevenly, typicality failed — Student A v. Liberty University, and it is worth reading before choosing a representative.

Predominance is where these cases are usually lost. Under Rule 23(b)(3) the common questions have to predominate over individual ones, and schools attack that with a question that sounds trivial and is not: who actually paid? Where tuition came from a mix of scholarships, institutional grants, parents, employers and federal credits, courts have found the individual inquiry swallows the common one. Evans v. Brigham Young University turned on exactly that. So did the individualised-damages holding in Student A.

The damages model has to be classwide. Under Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 569 U.S. 27 (2013), damages must be measurable on a classwide basis and the model must match the theory of liability. A pro-rata refund model works where a defined fee bought a defined service. A “the education was worth less” model is much harder, because it invites an argument about the value of each student’s year.

And certification is achievable. Classes have been certified in this area — Wright v. Southern New Hampshire University and Arredondo v. University of La Verne among them — and others have failed on every prong at once, as in Miller v. Grand Canyon University. The variable is almost always how clean the payment and policy record is, not how sympathetic the students are.

The injunction class, and why it matters more than it used to

Rule 23(b)(2) certifies a class for injunctive and declaratory relief rather than money, and it is under-used in student cases.

The reason it matters now: Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C., 596 U.S. 212 (2022), removed emotional distress damages from the funding statutes that reach schools, and Barnes v. Gorman, 536 U.S. 181 (2002), removed punitive damages. Neither touched injunctive relief. So where the claim is that a school runs a policy that systematically denies accommodations, or reports students to boards in a way the law does not permit, the remedy that survives is an order changing the policy — and that is exactly what a (b)(2) class is built for.

The limit is real. Under Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 564 U.S. 338 (2011), a (b)(2) class does not work where money is the point and the injunction is decoration. That is what sank the (b)(2) theory in Student A v. Liberty University. If you want the order, plead the order and mean it.

The contract theory the tuition cases built

The COVID refund wave produced a body of appellate law that is now the backbone of every student class action, whatever the subject.

The core holding is that a university’s obligations are not limited to what it signed. Courts have found an implied contract assembled out of the catalogue, the course registration system, the way the school had always operated, and — tellingly — the fact that it charged different prices for online and in-person programmes. Gociman v. Loyola University of Chicago, 41 F.4th 873 (7th Cir. 2022). Differential pricing is powerful evidence: a school that charged more for the thing it then did not provide has already valued it.

Other circuits reached compatible results. Shaffer v. George Washington University, 27 F.4th 754 (D.C. Cir. 2022); Jones v. Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, 51 F.4th 101 (5th Cir. 2022); King v. Baylor University, 46 F.4th 344 (5th Cir. 2022); Hickey v. University of Pittsburgh, 81 F.4th 301 (3d Cir. 2023); Rynasko v. New York University, 63 F.4th 186 (2d Cir. 2023).

Two lessons carry over to cases with nothing to do with a pandemic. General reservation-of-rights language does not automatically defeat the claim — several circuits declined to read a broad disclaimer as permission to stop delivering what was sold. And the specificity of the promise decides the case: courts are still working through how definite a promise has to be, with recent appellate decisions certifying that question to state high courts rather than answering it themselves.

In Florida, the implied-contract theory has been recognised in this setting — Rosado v. Barry University, 499 F. Supp. 3d 1152 (S.D. Fla. 2020).

Read your enrolment agreement before anything else

This is the first thing I look at, and it ends more class actions than Rule 23 does.

Many enrolment agreements now contain an arbitration clause with a class-action waiver. Under the Federal Arbitration Act those are enforced, and enforced hard: AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011), and Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 584 U.S. 497 (2018), leave very little room. A class-action waiver in a nursing programme’s enrolment agreement was enforced against students suing over a loss of accreditation in Salem International University, LLC v. Bates (W. Va. 2016) — a case worth knowing because it is the exact scenario students assume must be classable.

Unconscionability challenges exist and rarely succeed on their own. What is worth checking instead: whether the clause reaches this dispute at all, whether it was actually presented and accepted, whether the school waived it by litigating, and whether the version in force when you enrolled is the one being waved at you.

Florida court, federal court, and the removal problem

Florida class actions run under Rule 1.220 of the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, which tracks Rule 23 closely in structure and in the predominance and superiority analysis.

Filing in state court does not necessarily keep you there. Under the Class Action Fairness Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d), a defendant can remove on minimal diversity with more than $5 million in controversy — which is most of these cases. Expect removal and plan for it.

The exceptions are narrow and fact-specific. The home-state and local-controversy exceptions can send a case back where the class and the defendant are genuinely local, and courts have worked through them in the university context in decisions including Bradford v. George Washington University and Richins v. Hofstra University. Against a Florida school with a national student body, the local-controversy route is usually not available — which is a reason to make the forum decision deliberately at the outset rather than discovering it after a motion.

Florida consumer claims, and unjust enrichment

Breach of contract is not the only theory. FDUTPA — the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, Fla. Stat. §§ 501.201 et seq. — has been used by students against Florida institutions over accreditation representations and over recruiting built on inaccurate outcome figures. Cheatwood v. Barry University; Casey v. Florida Coastal School of Law (M.D. Fla. 2015). FDUTPA also carries fee-shifting, which changes the economics.

Unjust enrichment is pleaded alongside contract as an alternative, and it has a known weakness: where an express contract governs, the claim usually falls away. It earns its place where the school’s position is that no contract was formed — at which point it has argued itself into the alternative.

What being the named plaintiff actually involves

Nobody explains this before asking someone to sign, and it should be said plainly.

As class representative you are publicly named in the caption. You will sit for a deposition. Your academic record, your finances, and your communications become discoverable in a way they would not in an individual case. You owe a duty to absent class members, which means you cannot settle only your own claim on favourable terms and walk away. And the case will take years.

What you get in return is leverage no individual student has: a school that will litigate an individual appeal into the ground will think differently about a certified class, and the relief reaches every student in your position rather than only you.

It is a real decision and it deserves a real conversation, not a signature.

If you think you are not the only one

Before anything else, preserve. The material that decides these cases disappears on ordinary retention schedules.

• The published promise — catalogue, handbook, fee schedule, financial aid letter, programme page, in the version in force when you enrolled. Save the page, not the link.
• Your enrolment agreement, in full, including anything incorporated by reference.
• What you actually paid, and from what source — this is the predominance question and it decides certification.
• Anything sent to the whole cohort. A uniform email to every student in the programme is the best evidence a class case can have.
• Accreditation correspondence, self-studies and site-visit reports, which are frequently public and frequently say what the school will not.
• How many people are affected, even approximately.

Then have it evaluated before filing anything individually, because an individual settlement with a release can take you out of the class you were about to represent.

Common questions

How many students does it take?

Numerosity is rarely the obstacle — a cohort of forty can satisfy it where joinder would be impractical. Predominance is the obstacle.

My enrolment agreement has an arbitration clause. Is that the end?

Often it is the end of the class case, and not necessarily the end of the claim. Individual arbitration still exists, and where many students file individually the economics change for the school.

Can I bring a class action over a dismissal?

Almost never for the dismissal itself, because every dismissal rests on an individual record. You can bring one over the policy the dismissals were run through, if it was applied uniformly — and the relief there is usually an order, not a cheque.

What if the school is a public university?

Eleventh Amendment immunity limits what can be recovered from a state institution, and prospective injunctive relief against officials remains available. It changes the shape of the case, not whether there is one.

Will I have to pay anything?

Class cases in this area are handled on contingency, with costs advanced. What you spend is time.

Can I stay anonymous?

Sometimes, by moving to proceed pseudonymously, and it is not granted automatically. Ask before filing, not after.