Your Prospectus Is a Promise. Your Course Evaluation Is the Evidence You Kept It.

Bottom line: The long argument in higher education about whether students should be treated as consumers has been overtaken by a quieter fact: consumer-protection law already treats them as consumers, and has done for a decade. The Competition and Markets Authority told UK universities so in 2015. Since April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 lets the CMA impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover for unfair commercial practices without going to court first. Under that regime, what your institution promises about a course — in the prospectus, the module descriptor, the open-day pitch — is a representation students rely on when they enrol. The gap between that promise and what you delivered is your legal exposure. And your course evaluation is the most systematic evidence you hold of whether the gap exists.

The law already applies — this is not a forecast

In 2015 the CMA published advice for higher education providers on consumer protection law, reissued in 2023, setting out that students meet the legal definition of a consumer and that consumer law applies to their relationship with a provider — irrespective of level or type of study. The Office for Students has since made "protecting students as consumers" a regulatory expectation in its own right. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, a service must be performed with reasonable care and skill, and information a provider gives about the service — which the consumer relies on — can be treated as a binding term of the contract.

Read that last clause slowly. The claims in your marketing about class sizes, contact hours, named specialisms, facilities, guaranteed placements or study-abroad options are not puffery in the eyes of consumer law. If a student relied on them, they can be contractual.

What changed in 2025

The enforcement backdrop then hardened. The unfair commercial practices regime under the DMCC Act came into force on 6 April 2025, revoking and replacing the old Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. Two things changed that matter to universities. First, the CMA gained direct enforcement powers: it can now decide that a practice is unfair and impose penalties itself, up to 10% of a business's global turnover, rather than having to litigate. Second, the Act added specific prohibitions on fake or misleading consumer reviews and on "drip pricing."

This is a UK statute, but the European reader has a direct analogue. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) underpinned the old UK regime and applies across the EU, and the Modernisation ("Omnibus") Directive (EU) 2019/2161, applicable since May 2022, raised the penalties member states must make available for unfair commercial practices. The specific numbers differ; the direction — misleading pre-contract information is enforceable, and enforcement got sharper — is common.

Why course evaluation is the relevant record

Here is the connection most quality offices miss. A misleading-practice or breach-of-contract problem does not usually announce itself in a legal letter. It shows up first, and quietly, in feedback: the cohort that says the "small seminar groups" were sixty people; the students who chose the programme for a named module that was quietly withdrawn; the placement that was "guaranteed" and did not materialise. Course evaluation is the institution's own early-warning system for exactly the promise-versus-delivery gap that consumer law penalises.

Treated as a satisfaction ritual — a mean score filed and forgotten — evaluation throws that warning away. Treated seriously, it is risk management: a systematic, timestamped record of whether the service matched the representation, and, if you act on it, evidence that you did. The action gap — collecting feedback and never closing the loop — is not just a quality-assurance failing here; it is the difference between "we identified the mismatch and fixed it" and "we were told and did nothing."

There is a sharper wrinkle in the fake-reviews prohibition. A provider that publishes a curated wall of glowing student testimonials while sitting on systematic negative feedback about the same programme is closer to the line the DMCC now polices than it may realise. Selective quotation of your own evaluation data is a marketing habit that just got riskier.

The counterargument, taken seriously

The obvious objection is that this over-legalises education. Academic judgement, grades, and the ordinary experience of finding a course hard are emphatically not consumer-law matters, and a student who is simply dissatisfied has no claim. That is correct, and important: the exposure is narrow. It sits almost entirely in pre-contract information — concrete, checkable promises about what the provider would supply — not in academic standards or in whether a student enjoyed the module. Consumer law does not entitle anyone to a good degree.

A second, deeper objection comes from the critics of marketization: framing students as consumers distorts what evaluation is for, turning a developmental conversation into a transaction and pushing academics toward crowd-pleasing over rigour. That critique has real force, and this argument does not deny it. The resolution is not to pretend consumer law does not apply — it does — but to refuse to let compliance colonise the whole purpose of evaluation. Use evaluation's diagnostic power to catch genuine promise-gaps early; do not reduce teaching quality to whether the customer was pleased. Those two uses can coexist only if you keep them distinct.

Where Koji fits

Consumer-law risk lives in specifics — a named module, a promised group size, a placement that did not happen — and specifics are exactly what a five-point satisfaction scale destroys. Koji's AI-moderated conversational interviews probe for them: when a student flags that the programme was not what was advertised, the interview follows up on what was different, producing evidence you can act on rather than a number you cannot interpret. Automatic thematic analysis surfaces a systemic promise-gap across a cohort before it becomes a pattern of complaints, and closing-the-loop tracking creates the record that you identified and addressed it. Programme- and institution-level reporting lets a provider see where marketing and delivery have drifted apart. Because the same interview engine also powers wider customer and market research on the main Koji platform, institutions already using it for stakeholder work will find the model familiar.

Your prospectus makes promises on your behalf every day. Your course evaluation is the cheapest evidence you will ever have of whether you kept them — if you actually read it.

Turn evaluation into evidence you delivered. Koji for Education captures the specifics consumer law cares about — and the record that you acted.

Frequently asked questions

Are students really "consumers" in the legal sense? Yes. The CMA's 2015 guidance (reissued 2023) states that students meet the legal definition of a consumer and that consumer protection law applies to their relationship with a provider, regardless of the level or type of study.

What did the DMCC Act change in 2025? From 6 April 2025 the unfair commercial practices regime moved to the DMCC Act, giving the CMA direct powers to decide a practice is unfair and impose penalties itself — up to 10% of global turnover — plus new prohibitions on fake reviews and drip pricing.

Does this mean a student can sue because they disliked a module? No. Academic standards, grades, and ordinary dissatisfaction are not consumer-law matters. The exposure is narrow and sits in misleading pre-contract information — concrete promises about class sizes, named modules, facilities, or placements that were not delivered.

How is course evaluation legally relevant? It is the institution's systematic record of whether the service matched what was advertised. It is both an early-warning system for promise-gaps and, potentially, disclosable evidence — which is why acting on it (closing the loop) matters legally, not just pedagogically.

Does this apply outside the UK? The mechanism is UK-specific, but the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) applies across the EU and the Modernisation Directive (EU) 2019/2161 raised available penalties. Misleading pre-contract information is enforceable EU-wide.