At my university and in the higher ed media, I frequently hear talk of students being “customers” and, by implication, needing to be thought of and treated as such. While I don’t see a need to butt into every conversation that references students as customers, I nonetheless am struck by the problem of framing students this way. As a marketing professor and a practicing marketing professional, it is quite apparent to me how serious the implications are when college students are wrongly viewed as customers. Let me explain.
The Customer Relationship Is Built on Ease
There are two types of transactional patrons: customers and clients. Customers are parties who are viewed as needing to be appealed to by vendors who seek to understand what a group of people are interested in and then set out to, ideally, offer a product at an attractive cost (i.e., price) to gain market acceptance and patronage.
The easier and more attractive a transaction can be made by a vendor, the more likely the seller’s success in fostering sales; this typically means offering an attractive product at a lower price, with faster delivery time and/or the convenience of proximity.
Were I to ask the students in one of my classes what they were most interested in getting out of the course, they almost universally would say—perhaps with a smile—”offering an easy way for me to get an A!” And if I were prepared to deliver on such an offer by making the course shorter, easier and less stressful, many students would be exceedingly happy. I would have fulfilled their (misguided) view of my role as a good professor. In effect, I would likely be seen as creating—for them, certainly—a better product at a less demanding price.
While I’ve done no such thing, I can confidently say that if I were to pander to the self-interests of a sizable proportion of today’s students in this way (serving their immediate, short-term interests as educational consumers), I would compromise my teaching ideals and reputation and water down the course in the process, leaving students with a less rigorous learning experience. I would, by my most people’s standards, have been less professionally excellent. When an instructor acts in this manner, he or she is, indeed, treating students as customers.
There’s Another, Better Metaphor
However, as noted previously, there are two types of exchange conditions, which brings us to consider the other kind of transactional process, where students are not customers but instead are clients. In the client-centered transaction, there is a very different set of expectations and ground rules that define and then guide what the provider-buyer relationship is like and what’s expected to occur.
In client-type transactions, exchange of time, effort and money by the consumer are predicated on one party’s professional expertise and advice; the buyer party seeks in the long run to benefit from this know-how and counsel. Typical client-based vendor examples include physicians, dentists, financial advisers, tax preparers, accountants, veterinarians, therapists and professors.
In this type of transactional relationship, the provider is bound by professional standards to honor established, recognized ideals, guidelines and practices in his or her area of competency. In other words, there is a hard limit as to what the professional can or should be expected to do in providing an otherwise worthy and valuable transaction.
Immediate gratification is not an expected purpose beyond the offer of specialized counsel, advice and/or expertise. For example, a bariatric surgeon can’t perform a stomach-reduction procedure just because somebody wants one done; tax advisers can’t sanction illegal tax deductions simply because the client wants to pay less in taxes; architects ought not cut corners on drafting plans and blueprints just to save time or money for the client. Similarly, professors shouldn’t cut ethical corners with respect to teaching materials, testing or grading norms, or even enter into extra-credit deals just because a student (as customer) thinks that’s a good idea.
When students are viewed as clients, the professor is honor-bound and professionally expected to deliver a course that serves their field’s recognized standards and practices, instead of simply catering to the short-term desires of students. The detachment fostered by such considerations should in no way limit approachability or the felt intimacy of the service provision by the professor. Indeed, it is in the mutual interest of both parties in a client-based transaction to offer first-class service when it comes to cordiality, ease of access, affability, personal interest and respect.
Practical Implications
There are practical and institutional complications with this paradigm. To begin with, professors are all too frequently expected by chairpersons, deans and provosts to get as favorable teaching evaluations as possible from students, who are frequently immature, shortsighted, self-serving and generally naïve as to the purpose of higher education in their professional lives or the role a particular course may have in their future ambitions. An accomplished colleague of mine was recently rated down severely by students for having exams that were too difficult and grading practices that were viewed as too hard. In the end, he paid a price for having high, student-as-client standards in that he was denied a favorable merit-pay increase.
There is a second problem with widespread acceptance of seeing the student as a customer. To the degree that professors fail to understand the immaturity of their client base and seek to cultivate a student-as-customer relationship, the integrity of the institution of which they are a part is potentially compromised and student-as-client interests as course patrons are poorly served. Course content and rigor are likely compromised; the conditions for grade inflation are fostered. Consequently, students are less prepared for life beyond college, and the reputation of the institution is jeopardized by their weak performance on the job market.
What’s to Be Done?
There are several institutional issues that need to be attended to in addressing what seems to be the persistent—and popular—misconceptions of the student as customer; indeed, the pushback to this mistaken view requires a number of interventions, a few of which will be briefly noted here.
First, faculty development should convey and reinforce the notion that each professor in his or her field is an expert who is expected to serve as an authority and offer transformative student education rather than pander to marketplace (i.e., classroom) pressures.
Instructor evaluations need to include adapted evaluative measures comparable to those rating the service evaluation of physicians, dentists, financial advisers and the like. Such evaluations tend to focus on issues of process as opposed to product: e.g., they might ask whether a professor has a friendly disposition or is accessible for questions outside of class.
Peer teaching evaluations also have a role to play: Colleagues should make unannounced class visits to rate professors on a set of criteria that’s more professional and elevated in nature than what’s reflected in many student evaluations.
The student-as-client values should be addressed in the recruiting and admission process; once on campus, students should be repeatedly oriented as to what the professor-student relationship should be like in terms of what’s expected and what’s unacceptable. Similarly, professors would do well to underscore and cultivate the terms of student-as-client relationships in the course of their instructional activities each semester.
(It is beyond the scope of this discussion to explore when and how students do in fact play the role of “customer” at any given institution of higher learning. That role is certainly present in many noninstructional settings, including with regard to dining services, recreational activities, residential life and physical facilities. The attention paid to view students as customers in these [and other] contexts is worthy of a separate discussion and set of considerations.)
Thinking of students as customers in a classroom context is clearly misguided and leads to more than a few negative implications. Like doctors, lawyers and the like, professors merit the considerations of professional status afforded in other common client-based relationships and are right to hold students to higher standards than would be expected in a student-as-customer transaction. To expect anything else from professors would be to the detriment of students and the reputation of the institution at large.