Consumer protection law was designed for transactions: a customer, a product, a clear description, a remedy if the description was wrong. Applied to a three-year degree taught by people with academic freedom, in an institution that is also a research organisation, an employer, a landlord and a piece of civic infrastructure, it fits imperfectly.
This chapter examines what happens in the gap. Compliance becomes a fixed cost, which falls hardest on the smallest providers. Measurement of quality shapes behaviour rather than merely reporting it. Student protection arrangements turn out to cover the situations that are easiest to describe rather than the ones that do most damage.
And the regulator, having been created to police a market, finds itself making one — which is a different job, with different powers, and no obvious way to admit the difference.
Consumer promises can be documented, monitored and enforced, but the capacity needed to honour them cannot be summoned by regulation alone.
Regulated to Fail, Chapter 7
Where this goes next
This is the question the chapter opens with and the mechanism it identifies. What it concludes — and what follows from it — is in the book.
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