Covid-19 crisis: Angry undergrads suing colleges for billions in refunds

Complaints target colleges from University of California to Columbia; lawsuits claim inferiority of online versus campus classes

College students, kicked off campus by coronavirus, have a new extracurricular activity: litigation.
 

United States undergraduates have sued more than 50 schools, demanding partial tuition, room-and-board and fee refunds after they shut down.
 

The proliferating breach-of-contract suits, many of them filed over the last week, target some of the biggest names in higher education: state systems including the University of California and Arizona State, as well as private institutions such as Columbia, Cornell and New York University.
 

The students’ lawyers, advertising on sites such as Collegerefund2020.com, are seeking class-action status on behalf of hundreds of thousands of students. While legal