Colleges That Closed Dorms Amid Pandemic Are Refunding Students’ Money, Right? Not Everywhere

Laura Segall for The Chronicle

After students across the country were ousted from dorms and unable to use their meal plans as a result of the mounting coronavirus pandemic, some asked their colleges to refund their money.

Many institutions have complied — some relenting in the face of student outrage or petition drives — by offering a range of prorated refunds and credits based on the amount of time remaining on housing contracts or meals left on dining plans. At other colleges, however, anxious students and their parents have been coldly brushed off or told to be patient.

One such petition was shot down at Arizona State University. Its president, Michael M. Crow, didn’t mince words when asked whether students and parents would get refunds on housing and meal plans.

“The funny thing is that somebody declares a national emergency, and they’re talking about bringing out martial law in California,” Crow told The Arizona Republic last week in response to the petition. “And then people ask us, Are we going to give them a refund? Are you kidding me? I mean, that’s what you want to talk to us about, is a refund?”

Arizona State U.

Crow went on to say that refunds were “like 48th on a list of 48 things” on his university’s pandemic priority list.

Arizona State is a behemoth, but Crow’s strong words contrasted sharply with the responses of executives at other large public universities. After tens of thousands of students signed a similar petition at Ohio State University, for example, officials offered prorated refunds for student housing and dining plans.

“I am moved and impressed by the way our entire community is coming together to meet this challenge, and to keep each other safe and healthy,” Ohio State’s president, Michael V. Drake, wrote in a letter to students.

Drake’s letter did not mention the petition, and a spokesman for Ohio State declined to comment further on how the decision to offer refunds had been made.

Arizona State isn’t offering refunds at the moment, but that possibility isn’t entirely off the table, said Jay Thorne, a university spokesman.

“Along with the health and well-being concerns that the Covid-19 virus has caused, it’s increasingly a worry for people about their economic stability in the financial disruption this has caused, so we get that,” Thorne told The Chronicle. “The university’s top priority right now is to make sure we take care of our students, to make sure we finish the semester.”

Thorne added that “accommodations” for unused services such as meal plans would be evaluated once the situation is more stable. He said Arizona State didn’t “want to make some promise that we can’t keep.”

Paying the Costs

Arizona State isn’t alone in delaying a decision on refunds. In a statement provided to The Chronicle, Northern Arizona University said it was “examining the financial implications of Covid-19 and the possible relief for unused services as the situation improves.”
But students at the University of Arizona can expect at least a partial refund, a spokesman said. “We knew many of our students were going to have a hard time financially, and this was something we could do to help,” Chris Sigurdson told The Chronicle. “It was the right thing to do.”

Institutions of all sizes have offered prorated refunds and credits to students after temporarily shutting down or moving to online education.

Coronavirus Hits Campus

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Students’ Trust in Their Colleges Held Steady During Covid’s Early Days, Study Finds
• As More Stressed-Out Students Consider Dropping Out, Surgeon General Pushes College Leaders to Ramp Up Support

Many large public and private universities are offering at least partial refunds to students. Northern Illinois University is granting 50-percent room-and-board credits for the spring semester to students who moved out by March 22. The University of Wisconsin system is offering prorated refunds, and the University of Dayton, in Ohio, is giving prorated credits.

Some colleges have offered prorated refunds only for graduating seniors, who won’t be able to use credits next year. At Dayton, for instance, seniors graduating in May will receive “a prorated housing credit on their student account as well as a credit for any remaining meal-plan balance.” The credits will initially go toward any outstanding balance owed to the university. Refunds will be issued otherwise.

Colleges’ refunds, however, will come at a cost. The Dallas Business Journal estimated that some large universities might have to shell out tens of millions of dollars in reimbursements.

At Texas Christian University, for example, refunds could amount to upward of $28 million. The University of Connecticut — which is offering prorated refunds to students whose university housing, meal plans, and study-abroad trips were affected — anticipates that the refunds will cost $30 million. Florida State University estimated its cost for housing and meal-plan refunds would be $11.5 million. At the University of Arizona, Sigurdson said, refunds will cost as much as $7 million.

The cost of refunds would be a blow to any college’s bottom line, as budget plans do not typically assume an institution will have to reimburse millions of dollars in room and board fees. Some colleges could dip into their reserves or redirect endowment earnings, if available, but even those steps may be insufficient amid their increasingly shaky finances. And with state budgets facing freezes, if not outright collapse, public colleges are likely to already see big holes in their budgets.

Those costs could be at least partly offset by aid from the federal government, which in a huge spending bill nearing approval would provide $14 billion in emergency relief for higher education. Thomas C. Katsouleas, president of UConn, said that the federal stimulus legislation might be his university’s only hope to offset the costs brought on by the coronavirus.

“Without federal assistance, UConn does not have other means to recoup these losses,” Katsouleas said in a written statement. “Raising tuition and fees to the level needed would be untenable for our students and their families, and state support of this magnitude may simply not be possible. With a relatively small and restricted (by donor agreements) endowment, the university has nowhere else to turn.”