The student is the employer, though. They are paying the university for a service. They aren't the employee.
The student is the customer, not the employer, if you must phrase it in those terms.
And I think education benefits when you define the student as a student, before anything else.
Jonathan Haidt details quite a few reasons why treating a student as a customer creates bad incentives and poor outcomes (just agreeing with you on the student-first point)
Those educational benefits are being denied here, for reasons outside the customers hands.