Drawing on the ideas of consumer activism, this paper discusses the student as consumer complaints as an important but often overlooked mode of political agency in marketised universities. The paper starts with unpacking the notions of consumer choice as they relate to the process of boycotting and buycotting. I will then discuss how consumer rights and complaints intersect in marketised higher education (HE) and introduce a number of prominent student complaints from the UK context. The focus of this paper is centred around the question: To what extent can consumer rights provide students with political agency in marketised HE? While this paper is centred around the UK context, it argues that the rise of student complaints is also characteristic of many other European countries.

From a neoliberal perspective, consumers are seen empowered when they have enough choice to exercise their economic interest. Consumption from such perspective involves agency and can be viewed as ‘a free choice to be exercised by individual consumers who are at liberty to pursue their own private needs’ (Shaw et al., 2006, 1054). Many (e.g., McShane & Sabadoz, 2015; Shankar et al., 2006), however, argue that the idea of empowerment through mere consumer choice is misleading. It raises questions about who is engineering the choice, or what privileges are needed to have any actual choice in an economic market.

I argue that to view consumption as a political act, it demands that consumers recognise existing market structures that privilege the corporate profit-seeking and make critical links between their own consumption patterns and broader social issues. When consumers act as citizens, the process of consumption gets intersected with moral and political elements of production and distribution.

It is interesting to consider the extent to which students engage in consumer activism. It is likely that they do so as regards their consumption practices on campuses and beyond as existing research on students’ food preferences has highlighted. The difficulty, however, emerges when we try to consider how students practise boycotting and buycotting in relation to their university choices. Some may use the word of mouth to favour certain universities over others, depending on their political or ethical practices. Or it could be that some actively opt out from studying in Oxbridge or Ivy league due to their exclusionary practices or colonial history. Such choices related to rejecting certain universities should be seen as political acts. These acts, however, are not available to all, and for most students studying in the highest tariff universities is not an option they could consider at all.

Arbel and Shapira (2020a, 2020b) introduce a concept of ‘nudnik’ to capture consumers who are complaints focused and whose actions lead to various legal and reputational sanctions for businesses and corporations. Unlike the usual consumer activists who place their energy on pre-consumption choice making, a nudnik’s agency reflects in demanding that their expectations are met after consumption has taken place (Arbel & Shapira, 2020a). Furthermore, nudniks pursue action even in cases where most consumers remain passive; for them, to complain is a right thing to do even if it relates to something rather minor or does not result in direct individual benefit (Arbel & Shapira, 2020a, 2020b; Furth-Matzkin, 2021).

The idea of consumer as nudnik is an important avenue for exploring consumer agency in HE. It enables us to consider how the student as consumer position can become empowering after the student has entered or exited HE. This is particularly important in marketised universities where students are increasingly positioned as self-interested, focused on value for money and demanding of individual employment outcomes.

This paper forms a chapter in my forthcoming book, titled ‘Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights’. The paper centres around the UK setting, and it will provide a rigorous account of how UK students have been defined as consumers by British laws and what are the procedures that exist for students to raise complaints. While the first half of the paper is built on theories and legal frameworks, the second part draws on media cases as well as reports from the Office for Independent Adjudicator (OIA), to outline various exemplary cases of student complaints. UK universities are required to comply with the consumer protection law, set by the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The Act formalises student-university relations in terms of information provision, terms and conditions, and complaints handling (Competition and Markets Authority, 2015) To certain extent, the system is built around students as consumers being permitted and even encouraged to complain when the service they receive does not meet their expectations. The UK Government has also introduced an important actor of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education which is the main adjudicator for reviewing and overseeing consumer rights related complaints. Their function is to review the unresolved complaints from students about their HE provider. Furthermore, the OIA produces and disseminates annual reports on complaints handled to inform policies and practices across the HE sector, bringing reputational damage who do not comply with OIA’s recommendations. The OIA annual reports indicate that there has been a significant rise in student complaints in the UK. The OIA received 2763 complaints in 2021 which was an overall rise by more than 70% between 2016 and 2021 (OIA, 2021). The majority of complaints were declared to be ‘Not Justified’, and only 27% of cases were assessed in favour of the student (OIA, 2021). The OIA made recommendations of final compensation totalling £792,504 from which the highest financial compensation was just over £68,000, and 63 students received amounts of or over £5,000 (OIA, 2021).

This paper will demonstrate that most student as consumer complaints tend to relate to either academic provision and programme delivery (e.g., teaching, supervision, feedback), deficiencies in facilities or the behaviour of individual staff members. The paper will also argue that while the UK HE is possibly an extreme example of consumerist policy discourses, similar tendencies are likely to occur elsewhere in relation to student rights to complain, and questions around value for money. As HE scholars and practitioners, we often refuse to consider any positives of consumerism as it applies to universities, and perhaps fairly so, given that the policy discourses are so brutal about constructing students as consumers. Viewing students as consumers is likely to go against all established academic understandings of what education is for and how students are expected to engage with curricula, academics, or even the university as a place. However, this does not mean that there could not be an important agency involved in cases where students engage with consumer complaints procedures. As student complaints are on the rise, it seems pertinent to consider student positioning as nudnik who exercises their political agency through consumer rights, individual complaints and reputational damage caused to universities. Many (e.g., see Buckton, 2008; Fulford & Skea, 2019; Harris, 2007; Jones, 2006; McGregor, 2016) would argue that the student awareness of consumer rights has increased over the years which can be credited to tuition fee increases as well as students’ increased knowledge of their rights in HE. Examining student complaints processes can therefore reveal the power of students as consumers and agency they have in relation to prevailing market forces. It is also an opportunity to add nuance to the concept of student agency in marketised HE where collective forms of student organising have become less frequent and more fragmented.

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