You keep implying that the schools are doing their best in a trying time and deserve sympathy. Sure, that's fine. They're not acting in bad faith. But they aren't acting fairly. If the reason you went to a school was it had a cool robot building program, and you don't get to build any robots, that's clearly not what was offered to you. An online college is not worth the price of an in person college and it is very, very unfair to these students who are paying fortunes to get them. Much more unfair to the massively indebted students than the bureaucratically overbudgeted schools.

Employed engineers working remotely is a really bad analogy because engineers are paid to be available on an ongoing basis. Contract workers are a much better fit. If they were a contract worker, contracted to complete a specific task, and they don't complete the task... they don't get paid. COVID or otherwise. There is a wealth of pretty reasonable legal literature of settling disputes over partial completion of work.

> "While closing campus and transitioning to online classes was the right thing for Defendants to do, this decision deprived Plaintiff and the other members of the Classes from recognizing the benefits of in-person instruction, access to campus facilities, student activities, and other benefits and services in exchange for which they had already paid fees and tuition."

Note things like "campus facilities". Obviously 0% of that thing that they paid for was provided. And it should be reimbursed.

Educators are working their best, but that doesn’t mean that it is equal, because the stresses that have been put on students and educators are significant and can’t easily be worked around.

Also some things are simply impossible to do remotely, like music lessons or chemistry labs.