Over 1,100 students in University College Dublin (UCD) have signed a petition calling for the college to provide compensation for fees in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
Some 82.5 per cent of the signatories are international students, who have paid up to €37,000 in tuition fees for one year.
In a press statement, UCD Students’ Union Graduate Officer Conor Anderson said: “The University really needs to address the concerns these students are expressing. To pay upwards of €30,000 for an educational experience that includes library access, lab access, and practicals, only to be told that, actually, it’s all going to be online learning for the rest of your degree, is a shock.”
“Students understand”, Anderson said, “that this is an unprecedented situation but no one in the world would pay that much for an online course, and no university would charge it. So we need to talk about compensation”.
Aaditya Shah, an international student in UCD who started the petition, added: “My degree has been totally uprooted since UCD closed it’s [sic] campus and I returned to India. There is a major change in the teaching patterns since then, moving from in-class learning to distance learning.”
Shah continued: “I am living in a different timezone and I have limited access to resources like high speed connectivity, access to hard copy of books from the library, meeting facilities to brainstorm on group tasks.”
“I started the petition because the quality of the education student’s were receiving was not what we signed up for. Many of the international students have taken out loans to pay the hefty fees that UCD charges and are still paying rent in Dublin.”
“Considering the lesser quality of education we are receiving, we are asking UCD to provide compensation for this”, Shah said.
Earlier this month, UCD suspended all outbound Erasmus and non-EU college exchanges for the upcoming autumn trimester due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The college became the second Irish university to suspend international exchanges for its students, after the University of Limerick did the same last month. Dublin City University has since made a similar decision.
In an email to all UCD students who were due to go on an exchange abroad, Dr Douglas Proctor, the director of UCD Global, said: “The University has now taken the difficult decision that it will suspend Erasmus+ and Non-EU Exchange programmes for the Autumn Trimester 2020.”
