Hundreds of former Limestone University students owed tuition refunds, data shows
Limestone University owed nearly $400,000 to former students, as of last month, according to data the shuttered Upstate college provided a consulting firm responsible for managing its assets.
The 180-year-old private Christian university, which collected tuition from hundreds of summer session students in the weeks before it shut down this past spring, owed 281 students a combined $381,405 in tuition refunds, as of June 13, data shows.
The bulk of that balance was owed to undergraduate students, according to data provided by the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education.
Limestone owed $293,770 to 215 undergraduates — the majority of them online students — and $87,635 to 66 graduate students, data shows.
Last fall, the Gaffney college enrolled 1,545 undergraduates and 262 graduate students, according to provisional data, meaning that roughly 14% of undergrads and more than a quarter of graduate students were owed tuition refunds.
The S.C. Commission on Higher Education, which licenses all private colleges in the state, obtained the refund information from Aurora Management Partners, a consulting firm that has assumed responsibility for selling off Limestone’s assets.
The company was required under South Carolina code to provide CHE the names and contact information of Limestone University students who paid for education they had not received.
It’s not clear when, or if, Aurora plans to reimburse former Limestone students, who are owed about $1,350 each on average.
When reached by phone, a company official declined comment on the firm’s plan for disposing of Limestone’s assets and paying off the university’s debts.
“That’s all confidential between us and the other parties,” said a woman, who declined to provide her name but confirmed she was authorized to speak for Aurora.
Michael Thielen, a former Limestone MBA student who is owed more than $4,000 by the university, said Monday that he hadn’t heard from school officials or their designees in nearly two months.
Thielen’s last formal communication with Limestone came on May 21, when the school’s business office manager assured him the university was “diligently” processing refunds and said he’d be notified as soon as the process was complete, emails reviewed by The State show.
In the absence of any updates, Thielen eventually disputed the tuition payment with his bank, filed a fraud complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and reached out to several state entities.
“My bank is still processing the case,” he wrote in an email last week. “Every other governing agency has either not responded or informed me there is nothing they can do.”
The 34-year-old Texas resident, who will be starting business school classes at Charleston Southern University in August, said he was disappointed by what he described as the lack of accountability and transparency from all involved.
“Everyone has washed their hands of this,” Thielen said. “Terrible.”
Limestone University, which had seen its enrollment plummet by more than 40% in the last decade, announced its closure in late April due to what officials characterized as rising costs and “long-standing structural pressures facing small, private institutions.”
An audit completed just one month before the university closed found the school had substantially drained its endowment and would need to come up with $7.5 million just to stay afloat for another year.
“Accordingly,” the auditors wrote, “there is a substantial doubt that the University will be able to pay its obligations as they come due, and this substantial doubt is not alleviated by management’s plans.”
About six weeks after Limestone closed, a former employee filed a federal class-action lawsuit alleging the school violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, by failing to adequately notify its employees of their mass layoff.
The university, which informed employees of their impending termination less than two weeks before the school closed its doors, has yet to respond to the suit, court records show.