Opinion: Has UC learned its lesson?

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

In what will hopefully turn out to be the epilogue to a four-year saga, a San Francisco appeals court has upheld a 2006 court order to pay nearly $34 million to former University of California professional school students. That is, if the university doesn’t decide to appeal again.

That’s what it did in 2006, when the court originally ordered UC to pony up $33.8 million for plaintiffs in a 2003 class-action lawsuit. Mostly professional school students from UC Berkeley and UCLA, they alleged that the university made some drastic fee hikes — more than doubling them, in many cases — even though it had promised that fees would remain static for continuing students. For some students, like Boalt Hall student Mo Kashmiri, that meant a jump from $10,000 to $22,000.

If the university decides to appeal, it means more legal fees for everyone. Even if it cuts its losses now, it’ll be today’s students who end up footing the bill — that’s what happened in 2006, when professional school students had a surprise fee increase of $1,050 tacked on in order to pay for the cost of the suit.

Bottom line: Don’t ever try to pull a fast one on law school students. A lesson in the painfully obvious — and a costly one at that.