On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”.

See?  Half of you probably want to fight me right now.  But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way many people think it is, and that higher education would benefit from some clearer thinking on this.

Very few people think there is anything wrong with universities treating students as customers when it comes to the purchase and sale of non-academic services.  For instance, you don’t often hear people saying that students shouldn’t be treated as customers when they buy food from a cafeteria, or books from the bookstore.  Service should be timely and attentive, and the services should offer good value for money.  And if they don’t, you expect students to be able to complain and get redress if needed.

It gets slightly more complicated with services that are more tightly connected with the academic mission: say anything that comes under student services or various types of academic assistance.  Here, students have paid for something, kind of, as part of their overall package of tuition and ancillary fees, but it’s not a transaction, exactly.  It is access to a bundle of services which may or may not be used.  The analogy here is public services, like hospitals or municipal services.  These services don’t owe you a particular outcome, but they do offer a process or access to a set of activities that are not unlimited (one way or another, services funded through a general taxation or a flat charge like ancillary fees get rationed), but within limits, the managers of those services are meant to give them out liberally, impartially, and in a fashion which is friendly, timely and – so far as possible – in as simple a manner as possible.  Call it “public sector customer service” – you can’t give the customer everything they want, but you can nevertheless strive to make processes friendly and painless.  Again, this is not controversial for most people.

Where everyone gets their backs up is when they hear the idea that students might be considered as customers in the classroom.  But, I argue, this is because of a very subtle shift in language that happens when we start talking about students as customers.  Very quickly, in my experience, the language turns to invocations of the phrase “the customer is always right”, which leads to various horror scenarios about students demanding certain grades because they have paid good tuition money,  etc.  And of course, this does in fact happen – some students (not many, but some) do try to invoke this logic and professors are absolutely right to resist any advance of that logic into their grading practices.   

But note that shift in language from “customer service” to “customer is always right”.  That’s not the same standard at all, and confusing the two of them is a problem, because customer service values are perfectly compatible with teaching activities.  Think for about when you sign yourself or your child up for swimming, or karate, or whatever.  The fact that you are paying someone to teach you in these areas does not guarantee that you will eventually reach the level of Bronze Cross, or black belt.  That doesn’t mean that swimming schools or karate dojos lack a sense of customer service: it means that the way they interpret their customer service commitment is to teach you (or your child) to the best of their ability and make it as easy as possible for students to reach a certain standard of performance, if the students are serious about their craft.  

Now I could get really cynical and claim that part of what is going on here is that swimming and karate – unlike the vast majority of undergraduate courses – have credible and independently verifiable assessment standards which make it possible to separate the process of teaching from the assessment of outcomes and hence avoid confusion between “customer service” (which in fact is just normal, everyday professionalism) and “the customer is always right”.  But that’s probably not a fair assessment of what is going on.  I am honestly not sure what the explanation is: if I had to guess it has to do with a residual sense that the relationship between professor and student in higher education is closer to that apprentice and master than it is between a swimming teacher and a swimming novice, that it is about cultivation rather than instruction.  For students destined for graduate school or maybe even academia, that’s probably true: for everyone else, I suspect this description makes little sense, and therefore neither does the reluctance to associate professionalism with customer service.

In any case, maybe the best argument against treating students as customers comes from Harvard, in an anecdote recounted by Philip Delves Broughton in his book Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (which is quite a good book as student memoirs go, two thumbs up)    In it, he recounts the story of a particular student who felt that someone in the Registrar’s office as being insufficiently responsive to his needs/concerns/whims.  The conversation between the two got increasingly heated until the student finally yelled “why are you jerking me around?  I’m the customer.”  To which the employee responded, calmly: “No you’re not.  You’re the product.”

Obviously, that’s a logic that probably works better at a high-prestige institution than at one where the main concern is the more prosaic one of how to keep classrooms filled so payroll can be made.  But there’s a larger truth here, too.  Any institution that is genuinely doing its best to turn every single student it accepts into graduates who can thrive regardless of their chosen life/occupational path is, pretty much by definition, customer-centric.  It’s a value everyone can and should strive for, even while correctly rejecting a “customer-is-always-right” logic.