Letters | Protests and coronavirus in Hong Kong: students who can’t go to class deserve partial refund on fees
- First the anti-extradition protests then the coronavirus outbreak put paid to much of in-person teaching
- Hong Kong universities should compensate students for the lost opportunities in using campus facilities and interaction with faculty members
Due to the extradition bill crisis and the coronavirus outbreak, in the 2019-20 academic year, students enrolled in one-year taught master’s programmes in Hong Kong had only 11 weeks of on-campus classes in the fall semester and two weeks of face-to-face classes in the spring.
These students each paid between HK$100,000 and HK$200,000 in tuition fees. Considering the lost opportunities to use campus facilities and interact with faculty members, we urge all local universities to offer a compensation payment equivalent to one-third of tuition fees to each and every master’s student.
While we appreciate the universities’ efforts to deliver lessons online through platforms like Zoom and Moodle, and teachers’ attempts to connect with students through WeChat and WhatsApp, we believe the overall learning quality of online classes is still suboptimal – due to the lack of face-to-face interaction among teachers and students.
Moreover, for students stranded in mainland China, access to online materials in Moodle and Google Drive is also compromised by censorship.
A significant amount of the master’s programme tuition fee is used to finance campus amenities, such as university libraries, career centres, sports facilities and lecture halls featuring a range of seminars by distinguished scholars and speakers. As most of the campus services and activities were halted amid the coronavirus outbreak, we deserve compensation for the lost time we should have spent on campus.