Temple Students Create Instagram to Demand Tuition Refunds

Herby Boucard, a junior engineering major at Temple University, shared a meme on his Instagram story about paying full tuition despite coronavirus forcing online learning for the fall semester.

Lynn Darby, a senior education major, reached out to Boucard to create an Instagram page. Dedicated to Temple issuing a partial refund to students who can’t take advantage of all the university’s amenities due to the pandemic.

“Lynn reached out to me and was like, ‘let’s start something, let’s do a movement,’” said Boucard.

Thus @refundus_tu was born.

“In the year 2020, social media campaigns, especially in the year of Covid-19, are the biggest way to have a grassroots movement where you’re able to bring people in and start spreading awareness,” said Darby.

Without full access to the Tech Center, campus recreational facilities, and advising offices, students pay full tuition for a percentage of the amenities.

Darby and Boucard value in-person hands-on experience during their lectures and labs that they cannot participate in with the university’s distance learning protocol. While many other students have felt the tuition was steep for the circumstances, nobody else spoke up, so Darby and Boucard became a voice for Temple students.

For reference Temple currently charges $8,040 for an in-state undergraduate student in the College of Education and Human Development per semester and $14,496 for an out-of-state student in the same program. Students from Pennsylvania who study engineering pay $9,960 per semester and out-of-state students pay $16,416 per semester. Full tuition rates for all of the university’s colleges can be found at https://bulletin.temple.edu/undergraduate/tuition-fees/.

“We ask Temple University to appropriately adjust the cost of tuition as other institutions have already and refund students who’ve already bit the bullet and paid full price for lesser quality online classes,” Darby and Boucard posted on Instagram.

A week after starting @refundus_tu, the page already gained over 1,000 followers, at least 500 of them Temple students. The two students organized and held a protest Tuesday at the Bell Tower on Temple’s main campus.

Although many students echo Boucard and Darby’s thoughts, feeling comfortable enough to protest is different, Raza Naqvi was only other student who joined the protest.

“I feel like it’s very unfair that we have all these facilities that we’re paying for, yet we can’t use them because of a pandemic,” said Naqvi. “I feel like expressing a voice; it’s a lot louder than signing a petition. I think its the American way to express everything you feel because we have that freedom of speech.”

University spokesman Ray Betzner responded to a phone call for an official statement in response to the organization’s protest with an email.

“At Temple we are aware of the financial hardships our students and their families are facing. And that is why we did not increase undergraduate or graduate tuition for this year, said Betzner.”

Temple maintains that students have access to “many” services covered by their tuition fees, thus a refund is not applicable in this instance.

“In 2020, something like this does spread online, demonstrations like this have a tendency to grow from here,” said Darby.

Despite the lack of turnout at their first protest Darby and Boucard won’t stop their movement. A second protest at the Bell Tower is set Friday at 4 p.m.

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*Editors note: This story has been updated to reflect an official statement from Temple University.