The University of Minnesota will pay more than $3 million to settle a lawsuit over whether students should have received larger reimbursements after the campus shut down during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It would have been a fascinating trial," Hennepin County Judge Laurie J. Miller told attorneys in a hearing Friday morning, when she approved the deal. "I think you hammered out a settlement that is ultimately fair to both sides."
Lawyers expect that roughly 54,000 students, the majority who have since graduated, will receive checks of $38 to $40 each, after attorneys' fees and other costs are deducted from the settlement.
"It may not be a lifechanging amount that they are going to receive in these checks," Miller said. "But it is not nothing either."
The settlement requires the state's flagship university to pay $3.25 million to students who were enrolled in the spring of 2020, plus about $110,000 in fees to cover the costs of processing checks.
In March 2020, when officials were beginning to declare COVID-19 emergencies in the United States, the university moved to online classes and instructed students to move out of campus housing. The university announced it would refund students $1,200 for unused housing and dining fees.
Two students — Steven Staubus and Patrick Hyatte — sued. Their attorneys argued in court fillings that the university's reimbursement was woefully inadequate, noting that students also had paid mandatory fees for other services and facilities they weren't able to access for nine of the 16 weeks in the semester.
The university and students reached a settlement about a month before the case was to go to trial. The university wrote in court documents that it denied any wrongdoing but wanted to settle the case to "avoid the expense, risk, exposure, inconvenience and distraction of continued litigation."
