Yoga

Many of you may have already seen this piece from the Guardian last week entitled “My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me”.  The details are obviously England-specific, but it’s basically a riff on that oft-heard complaint: if the cost of education gets too high, and students start thinking of themselves as – shock, horror – consumers, then higher education is definitely dead, bring back the dark ages, etc., etc.

Now, without denying that there are probably some students who use the “I pay your salary” line as an excuse for bad behaviour, I still get a little puzzled by this line of thinking; not just because, in fact, students as a whole are often quite quick to reject the argument that they are “just consumers” (see this excellent rebuttal by Steven Jones at WonkHE – if you’re at all interested in UK higher education, and not following WonkHE, you’re doing it wrong).  Rather it confuses me because it’s awfully hard to see how this meme got started in the first place.

Sometimes people try to argue that higher education is not a normal consumer good, to be bought and sold; to get anything useful out of education, the consumer cannot be passive, but also must actively contribute to the process.  But higher education is hardly alone in this: personal fitness and yoga classes are a form of education that is paid for on a market basis, and those examples require consumers to put in effort in order for them to be effective.   But you don’t see personal fitness coaches going around saying “my clients paid me $100/hour and now they think they own me”, or yoga instructors complaining about clients expecting to achieve increased mindfulness without actually putting in the effort.

(Also, as an aside: you don’t see people trying to “disrupt” the Yoga industry through MOOCs, either.  Yet the underlying situation is kind of similar: why would people take boring local yoga lessons when they could take world-class yoga lessons from top yoga instructors?  Of course, the answer to this question may contain a hint as to why MOOCs haven’t done as well as enthusiasts thought.)

So here’s the question: are the people who purchase personal fitness and yoga services simply less annoying than higher education students?  Or has higher education somehow been sending a message to its clients – in a way that yoga and personal fitness clubs have not – that little-to-no effort is required?  If it’s the latter, how has this happened, and how do we stop it?

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12 responses to “Yoga

  1. Students aren’t consumers of higher education; they’re its product. Keeping that in mind helps me as a university educator understand what my role is: not to serve a customer, but to help create a product that will be successful post-university.

  2. Even granting the dubious and somewhat patronizing ppremise that you’re creating a product, many variables affect your ability to do that — not only your interaction with the student. Plus, how do you define success? Total post-graduate income? Satisfaction, however measured? Lifetime achievement? And how do you know you’re aligned with the student on that? Better to keep it simple: 1) we offer the program, 2) they choose it (for lots of different reasons), 3) our first responsibility is to deliver it as offered, 4) our second is to tailor it as much as we can to the individual student. But in the end, the basic deliverable is the degree. As for “entitlement,” my sense is that concerns about it are anecdotal and overblown. As a department chair, my response to “I’m paying for this degree” was always “no, you’re paying for the opportunity to earn the degree.” If nothing else it served to clarify whatever was at issue.

    1. Great distinction in your last line, Paul. Alex, I might point out that most people who take yoga and fitness training are motivated to improve themselves, and that motivation is usually intrinsic. Your comparison isn’t a very good one.

        1. At the risk of overgeneralizing, it is probably safe to say that students are more motivated (or compelled) extrinsically — that is by rewards in the labour market. They want degrees more than an education. Leisure activities tend to be taken for their own sake.

          1. I dunno. That seems a bit harsh to me. But yes, if the motivation *were* extrinsic it would be different

            (though not sure about all leisure activities…what about judo enthusiasts who need to move up levels? Wouldn;t that be similar? (I paid for this, you owe me a brown belt, etc etc)

  3. For most goods the customer is unhappy when you sell her something and then choose to give her less. But students are rarely unhappy when classes are cancelled. It follows that the classes and the education are not a complete description of the commodity the students are buying. In fact they are principally buying the certification and secondarily the teaching. That certification then has value to indirect customers who do not pay for the service — the employers who use the presence of a degree as a filter in hiring decisions, for instance.

    Those students who are focused so strongly on the grades they get and not so strongly on the corresponding learning provide evidence for the notion that while they need these indirect buyers to believe generally in the value of the certification (that is, to believe that those certified have some quality not shared by those not certified) the certification does not, so much, have to be an accurate reflection of their own learning or abilities.

    My point is that it cannot be a sound economic analysis to think of students as customers buying an education. When, however, the student pays the full cost of the teaching / certification process it would seem natural that they would begin to feel that they ought to exert some form of control over what they get for their money. Whether or not they do so needs evidence.

    1. Interesting point. I would argue that the students are really paying for the increase in employability and wage premiums that come from the certification. This looks like students being more concerned with grades than learning because graduate schools, professional schools, and many employers are looking at grades as a proxy of learning.

      To the yoga analogy, there are actually lots of people trying to disrupt the yoga and mindfulness space (see Headspace or Calm), they just haven’t got the kind of institutional backing that MOOCs have.

  4. The symptom ¨little-to-no effort-required¨ covers a multitude of sins on the part of the educational establishment too. Inadequate funding of resources eg keeping teacher´s salaries low with the consequence that recruitment is a problem in areas where living costs are high. This taking workers for granted extends to the currrent NHS strike of junior doctors caused by politicos needing to interfere but not necessarily pay the ¨price¨. Let the pendulum´s violent swing away in favour of market forces get slower before someone gets hurt.

  5. I’d agree that the distinction between students of higher education (HE students) who, apparently may/often complain that they are not getting what they paid (a lot) for or would prefer and yoga students who, apparently, seldom have this particular complaint does not lie in the need for “effort” (exists in both) or in the idea of student as both consumer and product (exists in both.) However, I think there are distinctive features:

    1. Certification: Among HE student goals is the getting of the piece of paper and it does have some potential social value; yoga students seldom seek an equivalent piece of paper, and its social value would be negligible anyway.

    2. Choice: HE students get to choose the degree program, but beyond that their choices are highly constrained by required courses and scheduling, meaning their choice of particular instructor is also highly constrained. Yoga students can pick the specific instructor, based on the particular brand of yoga and series of postures being taught.

    In short, no one is forced by circumstances to take yoga, but many students may feel that social conditions force them into degree programs (the alternative of poverty being so unattractive); and they then may feel that the structure of the degree programs forces them into courses and in front of instructors, whom they would not have otherwise have chosen.

  6. One factor that I think relevant but which no-one has mentioned is that, despite a fitness industry, Canada and North America continue to see deteriorating fitness practices. Apparently, if fitness is a choice, then it’s a choice that many people aren’t making, at least not effectively.

    Fitness clients clearly are customers. Some become quite serious (say, marathoners), but others just switch from one fad diet to another, dropping yoga for spin class for jazzercise, for aerobics, for whatever. To be effective, I suppose that university should be more like mandatory military service.

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