After a 2023 audit showed the University of South Florida overcharged students nearly $8.6 million in “distance learning” fees during the COVID-19 pandemic, USF denied wrongdoing.
But newly released emails and meeting notes, uncovered in an ongoing lawsuit and disclosed in a recent court filing, allege that university officials intentionally raised those fees to secretly recoup revenue from other waived charges.
The emails also show internal dissent from faculty and administrators over the distance learning fees.
The newly revealed internal documents, made public in a supplemental filing last week, could impact the outcome of a class-action lawsuit against the university and shed new light on how higher education institutions handled pandemic-era finances.
USF has previously said it did not overcharge students. USF spokesperson Althea Johnson declined to comment for this story.
Despite statingpublicly that they were reducing fees, USF “decided to secretly charge unwarranted and illegal distance learning fees… so they could collect the same exact amounts from their USF students,” according to lawyers for the student class in a May 9 court filing.
Distance learning fees are typically charged for online classes students choose to take. But during the pandemic, students had no choice, lawyers argue.
The distance learning fees, which totaled nearly $30 per credit hour, perfectly offset the loss of facilities, transportation and housing fees the school waived during the pandemic, according to lawyers representing USF students in the 2021lawsuit.
A representative for Florida State University expressed concern over USF’s approach during an April 2020 meeting of Florida’s 12 public universities to discuss student fees, calling USF’s decision “a net 0 for students.”
It also diverged from other state public schools, including Florida State University and Florida Atlantic University, which did not charge distance learning fees for classes previously held in-person.
Some faculty and administrators pushed for fees to be reduced in the wake of the pandemic, emailsfiled with the court show.
Javier Cuevas, then assistant vice president of faculty and academic affairs, wrote that he “would like to see our students … benefit from a reduction in fees for items from which they will not benefit at this time (e.g., transportation fee).”
“Students are right to ask why they are paying on-campus fees when they aren’t on campus,” USF Health’s Dean of the College of Public Health Donna Peterson wrote in an email.
Then-provost Ralph Wilcox called student requests for a refund on the fees “reasonable and well considered” in an April 2020 email to colleagues.
“Good old Ralph. In there pitching to give money away as always,” then-Chief Operating Officer David Lechner wrote in a private email to the school’s vice president for business and finance.
Lawyers representing students also claimed that USF violated the law by not handing over certain documents related to the lawsuit.
The case is scheduled to enter mediation in July.