A Degree of Uncertainty: The Covid Cohort’s Consumer Claim
Kate Washington - 2 March 2026
Nearly four years after lecture halls fell silent in the vast shift to online teaching during Covid-19, the legal aftershocks of the pandemic are still reverberating through the higher education sector. What began as emergency online teaching has evolved into a fundamental legal question: when students pay £9,250 a year, what exactly are they buying?
A long-awaited High Court case against University College London (UCL) was due to begin next week. Instead, it settled. Around 6,000 students who joined the Student Group Claim agreed confidential terms with the university.
The litigation was brought under consumer law. The argument is deceptively simple: students paid for in-person teaching, campus facilities and face-to-face academic support. What they received, for extended periods, was remote learning.
In most markets, if a consumer pays for one service and receives another of lower value, they may be eligible for compensation. On average, online university courses fees cost 25-50% less than those for traditional in-person courses. The students’ lawyers maintain their clients are owed “fair financial compensation”, having received online courses instead of the in-person ones they paid for.
Universities responded that they followed government guidance in unprecedented circumstances and continued to deliver degrees, academic credit and assessment. Universities UK, an advocacy organisation for universities in the UK, has said institutions “adjusted quickly and creatively” when in-person teaching was not permitted, to continue to deliver their courses. Many universities point to internal complaints procedures and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator as established routes for redress.
Yet the dispute is not only about the lockdown. Even if all universities were following government guidelines, the fact remains that students received a reduced service. Instead, the dispute is about the legal classification of a degree.
Is higher education a ‘service’ for the purposes of consumer law? Or something else entirely? A qualification, an intellectual process, an experience that resists commercial categorisation? Consumer contracts typically assume measurable outputs. A degree is harder to quantify. How does a court assess whether education was ‘fit for purpose’? And what is the benchmark – contact hours, campus access, employment outcomes, or something else?
These uncertainties are why the UCL case was so significant. Had it proceeded to court, a judge could have clarified whether moving teaching online amounted to breach of contract, and whether tuition fees reflected a broader campus experience. That ruling would have set a precedent: either providing or denying a basis upon which students could sue other universities.
Instead, the settlement preserves ambiguity.
Nevertheless, on the back of the UCL resolution, pre-action letters have reportedly been sent to 36 universities, representing more than 170,000 current and former students.
For now, the legal position remains unsettled. The courts have yet to say definitively whether a degree is a product, a service, or something more elusive. Until they do, both students and universities remain in a grey area.
So, the question lingers: when higher education becomes transactional, does it become a service – and who ultimately bears the risk when circumstances change?