Harvard Law School

A Harvard Law student has filed a class action against the university, arguing that students should be charged a lower tuition for online classes on the grounds that they are inferior to in-person instruction.

Harvard is the latest target in a wave of litigation focused on college and university tuition reimbursements amid the COVID-19 pandemic—at least 100 campuses have been sued thus far. Plaintiffs firms Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, which is representing incoming second-year law student Abraham Barkhordar, has also filed suit against 13 other universities.

Barkhordar's complaint, which seeks to represent all Harvard students and not just those who attend the law school, takes issue not only with the fact that students were not issued tuition refunds last spring when classes shifted online, but also that the law school plans to keep tuition at the same level of $65,875 even though the fall semester will be entirely remote.

"While Plaintiff's coursework requires group projects and collaboration, such teamwork is now significantly harder to orchestrate," reads the complaint, filed June 22 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. "Plaintiff has also been unable to connect with professors and classmates on the same level online as he had in-person and is similarly lacking the intellectual stimulation of the in-person learning environment."

According to the complaint, Barkhordar's online courses in the spring were less rigorous than in-person classes and he had less interaction with his professors, whose expectations of students were lower.

A law school spokesman declined to comment on Barkhordar's suit and a Harvard representative said Tuesday that the university does not comment on pending litigation.

But the law school said on its website that the decision not to lower tuition for the fall was made by the central university administration, and that the law school was only permitted to cancel a planned tuition increase to keep it steady at the previous year's figure. It said that student tuition accounts for 42% of its revenue, with endowments, philanthropy, executive education, and rent from law school buildings making up the remainder. The school said it's projecting steep declines in those nontuition revenue sources, with little corresponding decline in its expenditures. (Faculty salaries are the single biggest cost driver for law schools, and Harvard Law has not announced plans to reduce the size of its faculty.)

Unlike most other universities that have thus far been sued by students over tuition for online classes, Harvard Law School and five other graduate schools at the university have announced that they will remain fully online for the 2020 fall semester. (Harvard is thus far the only law school to announce such a move for the upcoming semester.) That decision has not gone over well with everyone. More than 400 current students and Harvard Law alumni signed a petition asking the school to implement a hybrid model that would offer a mix of online and in-person courses.

Incoming and current law students were given several weeks to decide whether to defer their studies for a year. But Barkhordar's complaint argues that the choice between paying "outrageous tuition" for online classes and disrupting their education isn't much of a choice at all. The class action, which is seeking upward of $5 million for members, claims breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and conversion.

"Plaintiff and Class Members did not intend to attend an online educational institution, but instead enrolled in Defendant's institution on an in-person basis," the suit reads. "The online learning option Defendant offers is subpar in practically every aspect. The remote learning option is in no way the equivalent of the in-person education putative Class Members were promised when they committed to attend Harvard."