NEWARK, DE - FEBRUARY 16: Tom Warnock of Freehold, New Jersey, a junior music eduction major and band member for the Delaware Fightin Blue Hens, warms up before the mens basketball team takes on the Drexel Dragons at the Bob Carpenter Center on Febru DOVER, Del. - A lawsuit against the University of Delaware over its campus shutdown and halting of in-person classes because of coronavirus can proceed as a class action on behalf of thousands of students who were enrolled and paid tuition in spring 2020, a federal judge has ruled.Friday's decision came just days before a scheduled hearing this week on the university's request for the judge to rule in its favor without a trial.
That hearing has been postponed indefinitely.In his ruling, Judge Stephanos Bibas rejected the University of Delaware's argument that the plaintiffs, who accuse the school of breach of contract and unjust enrichment, lacked standing to sue.
The university also argued unsuccessfully that it is impossible to know who actually paid tuition because some students may have used outside sources like scholarships."Those students, no less than students who paid out of their own pockets, were parties to a contract that U.
Delaware allegedly breached," wrote the judge, who noted that the only students excluded from the class would be those who received full rides.According to the ruling, more than 17,000 undergraduates were enrolled at the University of Delaware in spring 2020, and the university collected more than $160 million in tuition.The plaintiffs have argued that, before the pandemic, the school treated in-person and online classes as separate offerings and charged more for some in-person programs than they did for similar online classes.