The Student-as-Consumer Effect: What a Consumer Mindset Does to Course Evaluations

In brief: Bunce, Baird and Jones (2017), surveying 608 UK undergraduates, found that a stronger consumer orientation — viewing oneself as a fee-paying customer entitled to a qualification — was associated with lower academic performance, and that consumer orientation mediated the usual link between learner identity and grades. For course evaluation this matters because the consumer frame reshapes what a "satisfaction" score measures: it pulls evaluations toward service expectations (was I entertained, was it easy, did I get the grade I paid for) and away from learning. Satisfaction and learning are not the same construct, and the consumer mindset widens the gap.

What the research says

The marketisation of higher education — tuition fees, league tables, "the student experience" — has been accompanied by an explicit reframing of students as customers. Louise Bunce, Amy Baird and Siân Jones (2017), writing in Studies in Higher Education, asked whether that frame is benign. They surveyed 608 undergraduates at English universities, measuring a consumer orientation (the degree to which students endorsed consumer attitudes and behaviours toward their education), alongside learner identity, grade goals and actual academic performance (grade point estimates).

Their key findings:

• A higher consumer orientation was associated with lower academic performance. The relationship held after accounting for other predictors.
• Consumer orientation acted as a mediator. It sat on the causal pathway between learner identity and grade goal on one side and performance on the other — meaning the consumer frame is not just correlated with worse outcomes but appears to be part of the mechanism, dampening the normally positive effect of a strong learner identity.
• Responsibility for paying one''s own fees, and studying a STEM subject, predicted a stronger consumer orientation — suggesting the frame is partly structural, activated by who is footing the bill.

The authors are careful: this is correlational survey data, not a manipulation. But the mediation pattern is theoretically coherent. If you construe a degree as a purchased product, the rational consumer behaviour is to minimise effort-per-unit-grade — exactly the orientation that undermines the deep engagement learning requires.

This connects directly to a much older and more robust finding in the SET literature: the leniency / satisfaction–grade link. Students reward courses (and instructors) that are enjoyable and that grade generously, and these rewards are not the same thing as learning more. Stroebe (2020), in Perspectives on Psychological Science, argues that SET creates a structural incentive for grade inflation — instructors who give higher grades earn higher ratings, a feedback loop the consumer frame intensifies (covered in our note on the SET–grade-inflation incentive). And the long line of work culminating in Uttl, White and Gonzalez (2017) shows that ratings do not reliably track actual learning, so a satisfaction-maximising consumer orientation and a learning-maximising one can point in opposite directions.

A complementary sociological literature (e.g., Tomlinson, 2017, on student attitudes to marketised higher education) documents the same consumer identity qualitatively, and debate continues about whether the orientation is a cause or a symptom — but the convergence between Bunce et al.''s quantitative mediation result and the SET incentive literature is striking.

Why it matters for course evaluation in practice

The student-as-consumer effect is not an argument against listening to students. It is an argument for being precise about what a satisfaction score means in a marketised system.

1. "Satisfaction" and "learning" can diverge — and the consumer frame widens the gap. If a cohort holds a strong consumer orientation, high satisfaction may partly reward low demand, generous grading and entertainment value rather than educational quality. A QA office reading satisfaction as a learning proxy will systematically over-reward easy, popular courses and under-reward demanding, high-value ones (see course difficulty and workload effects).

2. The incentive structure is real for staff. Because ratings feed promotion and contract decisions in many institutions, and because the consumer frame ties ratings to leniency, instructors face a quiet pressure toward grade inflation and reduced rigour. An evaluation system that does not separate "I enjoyed this / it was easy" from "this developed my capabilities" amplifies that pressure.

3. Marketisation is uneven, so scores are not comparable across contexts. Bunce et al. found consumer orientation varies with who pays and what is studied. That means raw satisfaction means are not automatically comparable across programmes with different fee structures or disciplinary norms — a benchmarking hazard (see what value-added studies show about learning vs ratings).

The constructive response is to design evaluations that distinguish service satisfaction from educational gain, and to interpret satisfaction scores as one signal among several rather than the bottom line of a transaction.

Limitations and honest caveats

A rigorous reader should weigh several constraints before over-reading the consumer effect.

• Correlational, self-report design. Bunce et al. (2017) is a cross-sectional survey. The mediation model is theoretically motivated but cannot establish that consumer orientation causes lower performance; reverse causation (students doing poorly retreat into a transactional stance) and common third causes are plausible. Academic performance was self-estimated, adding measurement error.
• Single national system. The study is English, in a high-fee, marketised context. In systems with low or no tuition fees (much of continental Europe), the consumer frame may be weaker or activated differently, so effect sizes should not be transported wholesale.
• Effect sizes are modest. Consumer orientation is one of several predictors; it does not swamp learner identity or prior attainment. The finding qualifies how we read satisfaction, it does not invalidate student feedback.
• "Consumer orientation" is a contested construct. Measuring an attitude via agreement items inherits all the usual hazards — acquiescence, social desirability, framing. Different operationalisations yield somewhat different pictures, and some scholars argue a moderate consumer awareness (wanting value for money) is reasonable and not harmful.
• The SET incentive link is inferential. That ratings reward leniency is well evidenced; that this causes system-wide grade inflation is a plausible model with mixed direct evidence. Stroebe argues the case forcefully but it remains debated.

The honest summary: consumer orientation is robustly associated with worse outcomes and with a satisfaction-not-learning reading of evaluations, but the causal and cross-national strength of the effect is still being established.

How Koji incorporates this

Koji is designed to measure educational gain and specific experience, not undifferentiated consumer satisfaction — directly addressing the construct-confusion the student-as-consumer literature exposes.

• Separating service satisfaction from learning. Koji''s structured question set (open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, yes_no) lets institutions ask distinct questions about what was learned and which capabilities developed, kept separate from "did you enjoy it" and "was it convenient." This is designed to mitigate the consumer-frame distortion in which a single satisfaction number rewards ease and entertainment.
• Probing the reason behind a rating. Where a transactional respondent might give a blanket high or low score, Koji''s AI-moderated conversational interview asks why and for a concrete example — surfacing whether a high rating reflects genuine educational value or simply low demand and a generous grade. The aim is to give QA staff interpretable evidence rather than a consumer-satisfaction headline.
• Triangulation against the satisfaction-grade loop. Because Koji collects multidimensional, themed evidence rather than one global mean, institutions can read satisfaction alongside learning-focused items and open-text themes, helping counter the SET grade-inflation incentive rather than feed it. We frame this as designed to reduce, not eliminate, the pressure the incentive creates.
• Context-aware reporting. Reporting keeps cohort and programme context visible so satisfaction means are not naively benchmarked across programmes with different fee and disciplinary structures, in line with Bunce et al.''s finding that consumer orientation varies with who pays.

The same AI-moderated interview engine powers Koji''s core customer and product research platform at koji.so — where distinguishing what a customer says they want from what actually serves them is the identical analytic challenge.

The bottom line for practice

Marketisation does not make student feedback worthless; it makes the word "satisfaction" ambiguous. A satisfied consumer and a well-taught learner are overlapping but distinct populations, and a single satisfaction mean cannot tell a quality office which one it has actually measured. The remedy is not to stop asking students — it is to ask them separately about service and about learning, and to read the two answers side by side rather than collapsing them into one transaction score.

Related resources

• Course difficulty and workload in student evaluations
• The SET grade-inflation incentive (Stroebe)
• Grading leniency and student evaluations
• Value-added learning vs student evaluations (Carrell & West)
• Student evaluations, teaching and learning: the meta-analytic record
• RateMyProfessors validity vs institutional evaluations

References

• Bunce, L., Baird, A., & Jones, S. E. (2017). The student-as-consumer approach in higher education and its effects on academic performance. Studies in Higher Education, 42(11), 1958–1978. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1127908
• Stroebe, W. (2020). Student evaluations of teaching encourage poor teaching and contribute to grade inflation: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 42(4), 276–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2020.1756817
• Uttl, B., White, C. A., & Gonzalez, D. W. (2017). Meta-analysis of faculty''s teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54, 22–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2016.08.007
• Tomlinson, M. (2017). Student perceptions of themselves as ''consumers'' of higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(4), 450–467. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2015.1113856