As mid-March rolled around, students were sent home due to the pandemic. This led to lawsuits demanding the colleges and university offer refunds to students for things like student parking, housing, and other campus fees that range from $800 to $4,000, depending on the campus. One of those was a class action lawsuit aimed at the California State University filed on April 27 by SSU student Akayla Miller.
When reaching out to Akayla Miller, the student who initiated the lawsuit against the CSU, she was unable to comment, explaining that she would need to speak to her lawyer in order to share any information regarding the case so far. However, in an article from the Press Democrat, she stated, “It sends a message that they can’t treat students like this. It’s not fair to pass their financial hardships on to students in a time when it can be so tumultuous. It’s not fair for them to treat us like this.”
According to the court documents, the CSU has no right to retain money paid for by students because the services they’re paying for aren’t being provided by their school. These include mandatory fees like the Health Center, student association and student center fees. They even go on to say that the CSU system would receive $350 million dollars from the Coronavirus Aid and Economic Security Act. The CARES Act was a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill passed by Congress back in March from which Sonoma State received $9.7 million dollars.
The Senior Director of Public Affairs, Michael Uhlenkhamp stated that, “Mandatory fees support programs that benefit the campus community as a whole. For example, many students will not use the Health Center, but the services it provides are extremely important to some members of the student body. And services like the Health Center continue to operate remotely and continue to remain available to students. The Interim CSU Refund Policy also states that mandatory fees would not be refunded because they would continue to provide credit for academic courses, even if it was remotely and therefore “not warranted.”
In an email from President Judy Sakaki, she explained that those $9 million dollars would be split between financial aid grants to “mitigate the pandemic’s financial impact on the university and its students,” and to recuperate money lost to the “unexpected costs” in the transition to a remote learning. Chair and Vice Chair of the President’s Budget Advisory Committee, Karen Moranski and Joyce Lopes, said that of the $4.5 million not used for financial aid grants, 64.8% of those funds were used solely on housing refunds.
The University of California system was also sued by students. Nonetheless, they remained firm that they would not refund any fees whatsoever.
Because the results of this lawsuit are still pending, it remains unclear how this lawsuit will impact the CSU system and students in the future.
