NEWS ITEM

California Trial Court Awards $38 Million to Students for University of California's Improper Fee Increases

University Breached Contracts for the Price of Students' Education

March 10, 2010. The San Francisco Superior Court held today that the University of California must pay more than $38 million to students for breaching contracts when it raised fees after professional degree students enrolled beginning in 2003.

The ruling by Judge John E. Munter affects approximately 2,900 students, most of whom have graduated, and holds that the University broke its promise to students who applied to and accepted the University’s offer of admission to professional school prior to August 25, 2003, and first enrolled in professional schools in the 2003-04 academic year or thereafter. The court recognized that, at the time these students accepted admission, University policy stated that professional degree fees would remain constant for the duration of their enrollment. The court found that this policy created a binding contract that the University broke. Despite the policy, the University raised the fee for medical, dental, law, pharmacy, business, and other professional students repeatedly over the years, imposing increases of up to $6,400 in a single year. By the end of their programs, some students were paying over $8,000 more in annual fees than what they expected when they started.

The court emphasized that ordinary principles of contract law apply to universities in dealing with their students, relying on a precedential opinion from the Court of Appeal in a previous lawsuit brought by professional degree students against the University of California, Kashmiri v. Regents of the University of California, 156 Cal.App.4th 809 (2007). In 2007, the Court of Appeal decided that students who enrolled prior to December 2002 were entitled to a refund of the excess professional degree fees they were required to pay in violation of the University’s commitment to keep the fees constant. In the decision today, the court held that students who entered in 2003-04, the year after the Kashmiri v. Regents students, were entitled to rely on the same policy, which the University continued to publish to these students as they were deciding which schools to attend.

Altshuler Berzon LLP and Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP are co-counsel for Plaintiff students in the lawsuit. The same law firms represented students in Kashmiri.

For more information about this lawsuit, please contact paralegal Jusztina Traum at 415-421-7151 or jtraum@altshulerberzon.com.

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