I think the better restaurant analogy is if you went to a buffet and the restaurant ran out of X for 15 minutes of the hour that you were there and replaced it with Y. If X was lobster and Y was frozen fish sticks, it’s pretty reasonable that you would expect the restaurant to knock off a few bucks (or give you a coupon for the next visit). If however Y was crab legs and the buffet also had filet, seabass, etc… that did not run out, the expectation of a refund, if any, would be much different. Going back to the article I linked upthread, a major chunk of what you pay for in a Harvard tuition is the certification value (i.e. the diploma that says Harvard). Also, let us not fool ourselves, the people driving all of this litigation is the plaintiffs bar, who definitely are not going to let this crisis go to waste.