TRENTON, N.J. (Legal Newsline) – A part-time student can’t sue Rutgers over allegations it lied to obtain higher rankings, the school is arguing.
Rutgers Business School filed a June 27 motion to dismiss Lorenzo Budet’s proposed class action that says prospective business school students were misled into thinking they should attend Rutgers because it had submitted false employability statistics to places like U.S. News & World Report and Financial Times that rank colleges and universities.
Budet hopes to represent a class of students in the school’s Master of Business Administration program and other master’s degree programs.
However, Budet lacks standing to bring the lawsuit, Rutgers claims.
“The supposed false employment information and the institutional rankings data and standards that Plaintiff points to in support of his claims relates specifically, and solely, to RBS’s full-time MBA program,” the motion to dismiss says.
“Plaintiff is not, nor has he ever been, enrolled in RBS’s full-time MBA program. Plaintiff’s complaint instead conflates RBS’s full-time MBA program with the various other Masters programs offered by RBS, such as part-time MBA and numerous specialty programs, each of which are separate and distinct from the other when it comes to… employment outcome reporting, the institutional rankings compiled by the different publications and the tuition they charge to students.”
Rutgers also argues that a claim under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act fails because public entities like itself are not subject to it. It also says Third Circuit precedent rejects Budet’s claim he paid an inflated tuition.
Rutgers is represented by Jeffrey Soos and other lawyers at Saiber LLC. Attorneys at McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton are pursuing the case.
“But for (Rutgers’) high rankings… Plaintiff would have selected a different program. If Defendant Rutgers Business School had not received these high rankings, Plaintiff would have not agreed to pay Defendants’ premium per credit rate of tuition,” the lawsuit says.