Appeals Panel Pulls Plug on Tuition Refund Class Action vs Bradley University Over Covid Closures

A federal appeals panel has undone class certification in a lawsuit demanding tuition refunds from Bradley University (IL) for allegedly breaching its contract with students when it closed the Peoria campus to in-person learning during the early days of the Covid pandemic. The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, issued April 12, follows a July 2022 opinion from the same court reviving litigation facing Loyola University and a March opinion doing the same with respect to Illinois Institute of Technology. Unlike those actions, which focused more on the factual disputes between students and schools, the Bradley opinion turned on the federal judge’s approach to class certification.