KOIN 6 News | By Jennifer Dowling | October 5, 2018
A group of former students is suing the recently closed Marylhurst University, claiming it collected tuition under false pretenses.
The lawsuit, which names 28 plaintiffs who paid as much as $8,434 for tuition in April 2018, claims those students would not have paid if the university was honest about its financial trouble.
“Marylhurst promised its students an exceptional academic and social experience and represented to students that they would be able to complete their degrees at Marylhurst,” the lawsuit says.
The university announced in May 2018 that it would close by the end of the year, offering its final classes in summer 2018. The board of trustees made the decision to close due to declining enrollment. They projected a continued decline in enrollment that would make it impossible to stay financially viable.
The lawsuit claims that by March 2018, “Marylhurst executives knew and should have known that the university was closing,” and therefore students paying tuition in April 2018 would not be able to finish their degrees at Marylhurst as advertised.
Students told KOIN 6 News some of the classes they paid for were specific to Marylhurst and the credits couldn’t be transferred. When students tried to withdraw in order to get their money back, they say they were told no.
“The problem was we knew in spring term, in May, so all the other colleges in the world had done their acceptance and rejections, so most enrollment was closed, we couldn’t get housing,” plaintiff Becky Lauer said.
Chelsea Vincenzi said she paid $4,000 for her spring classes. She eventually transferred to Concordia, but was financially impacted.
“That’s a lot for a single mom, that is like tons of bills,” she said. “Marylhurst had taken the last of my Pell Grants, so I’m just on loans here. I’m not getting grants because Marylhurst took the last of it.”
“Rather than being up front about its educational services as the law required, Marylhurst executives instead decided to mislead students, and falsely tell them that any problems had been solved,” the lawsuit says.
The former students suing the university claim they would not have paid tuition if they knew the university would be closing.
“Marylhurst intentionally did not disclose its crippling insolvency and intentionally did not disclose that it would be closing because Marylhurst knew that if it was honest with students, they would not have paid tuition in April 2018,” the lawsuit says.
The former students are asking for a refund on their tuition and up to $1.1 million in punitive damages.
Marylhurst said this lawsuit is a very small subset of the previously dismissed federal court putative class action lawsuit, where damages in excess of $5 million were claimed. Up until closing Marylhurst’s leadership had focused on helping students to graduate or transfer to nearby colleges and universities.
“The moral and ethical thing to do would have been to tell us this term and have it continue out this year,” Lauer said.
