A Harvard education is not a la carte. You don’t get to pick the services you will pay for and take a pass on the ones you don’t use. Even though professors were online, they still had office hours, they still had advising, they still had access to the library. If the student needed something, a librarian could get that material to them. They received full credit for the courses they took. If they wanted ‘more’ they should have demanded it. In fact if they are so smart and special, they should have been able to figure it out for themselves. Need a small group discussion? Set up a Zoom. Isn’t Harvard supposed to teach them to problem solve?
I’m sure there are students at Harvard who don’t take advantage of office hours or study groups or the library when they are on campus. Should Harvard refund part of their tuition every semester? There are students who don’t take advantage of guest lecturers or lab opportunities and think it is a waste of tuition money for the college to support those events. Too bad. It’s like taxes; you don’t get to say that you aren’t in favor of supporting a war or food stamps or farm subsidies. Those are part of the package and you don’t get to direct your tax dollars.
If the Harvard students don’t think they got a Harvard education, they should not take credit for the semester and ask for all their money back. They could either then retake the classes or not graduate from Harvard. Or they could have an * on their transcript and diploma saying that although they received Harvard educations, they were quite as good as a REAL Harvard education. When you order an item from Amazon and return it, you do get your money back but you don’t get to keep the item and you certainly don’t get to keep half the item and get half your money back. You can’t have it both ways. They either earned (and paid for) a Harvard semester or they didn’t.