S'pore students join 95,000 in lawsuit against UK universities

They are seeking compensation for disruptions to teaching, access to facilities during pandemic

- Ng Wei Kai

Singapore students enrolled in British universities during the Covid-19 pandemic have joined about 95,000 others in a legal suit that could see some of them getting tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for disruptions to teaching and access to facilities.

One of them, Mr Tang Lingxi, said the pandemic upended his classes and deprived him of fundamental parts of his education.

When Mr Tang, 25, entered the University of Oxford in 2018, he expected world-class teaching in his chosen field of engineering.

He paid about£33,400 (S$54,420) a year in fees for his four-year course. This works out to about $218,000 in total.

When Covid-19 rolled around, the university shut all its facilities.

This deeply impacted the quality of education he received, said Mr Tang, who is now working as an energy market analyst in Oxford.

He said: "It was unfair that students were still paying full school fees, especially for engineering students, as we were supposed to have access to things such as 3D printing and computer labs and workshops, but those were suspended." He added that some of the chemistry-related experiments, which students could not conduct themselves outside of university premises, were cancelled, and that the situation was especially unfair to those studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects as they had higher course fees to cover lab access and materials.