Online grads sue USC

[smartdegree]

I found and read the filed complaint with the court. The majority of this group keeps discussing the $60K to $100K online tuition price tag. Question. Would it be fraud if it was only $10K to $15K for the same experience at USC? The online tuition price tag isn't a main component of the lawsuit, and I don't understand why everyone keeps discussing it. The lawsuit is about false rankings and paying for USC education and not receiving it, instead it was outsourced to 2U.
Here is the court filing. https://defendstudents.org/news/body/202...plaint.pdf

The fraud lawsuit is directly tied to the tuition cost because the ranking and advertising allowed them to charge top dollar for tuition.  In other words, the assumption is the students would not have paid the 60K to 100K in tuition if they had known better (see page 5 section 10 of the court filing you shared which explains in detail).  Part of the fraud is making it seem that the online program was sharing the reputation of the on-campus / in-person ranking (see page 4 section 8).

My personal view is that online programs should cost significantly less (at a huge discount) vs the regular on-campus degrees within the same university. I know the universities say that it's all the same yada yada yada. But let's be honest - online programs require a lot less physical resources to run and are cheaper to maintain and scale. So where are the savings from online going? Obviously that isn't going to the USC online students, but to USC itself.