If You’re in College, are You a Student or a Customer? Both?
Posted on February 26, 2010 by Barbara Macaulay
In the first full week of this new year, a New York Times blog called Room for Debate featured five academic voices from higher education giving their opinion on the question of whether or not college enrollees are students or customers. It’s a conversation The Times acknowledges was ignited by an article in The Chicago Tribune.
I really enjoyed reading the various viewpoints but they got me thinking. After carefully reading the viewpoints of the five contributors – all men, by the way, which I find a little interesting coming from The New York Times – it was clear that 80% rejected the notion of students as customers. This should have been startling and yet in some ways it is not. So I think we should put this to our readers. What do students think? What is your point of view? Want to sound off in favor of one side or the other… weigh in here.
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Interesting post Barbara!
Personally, I have always been on the “students are not customers” side of the argument. If you treat students as customers there are problems that can crop up, problems that affect the academic nature of the institution. I do believe that we should make things easier for our students. Some examples are: it should be easier to get your library card, to access resources, to get help with that wireless connection that’s giving you grief, to be able to find out correct and accurate information about paying your bills or submitting that graduation form.
If we treat students as customers it can spill into academics. What happens if I think that I did this excellent job on a project but I get a B+. Do I have the right, as a “customer”, to go complain to the powers that be so I can get an A if my work was not warranting an A?
I think that as people working in Higher Ed we need to do our best to help our students achieve the highest level of scholarship that they can and want to achieve. We should not work as a corporation, treat them as customers that pay, that we thank them and ask them to come again.
Of course, the elephant in the room seems to be the increasing costs of higher education in america. If higher ed costs keeps going up can students be expected to not feel like customers if they are paying for the equivalent of a luxury car over the course of their studies. I don’t have an answer for that question - it’s just open to the group