The Fallacy of the Student as Customer

More than three in five college students now see themselves as customers of their institution, according to a recent Inside Higher Ed survey.

That number is not surprising. College is expensive, and universities themselves often encourage students and families to think in consumer terms. They advertise the campus experience, the career payoff, the flexibility, and the return on investment. They may not literally say, “You are the customer,” but much of the message points in that direction.

There is evidence that this can be rational for institutions. In their article “College as Country Club,” Brian Jacob, Brian McCall, and Kevin Stange find that many students appear to value the nonacademic experience of college, while preference for academic quality is more concentrated among high-achieving students. In other words, colleges may market themselves this way because it works.

So the problem is not simply that students have become entitled or confused. Students are responding to a market universities helped build.

Still, the language matters.

To an extent, the idea that “the student is the customer” is reasonable and appropriate. Students deserve to be treated well. Universities should not be indifferent, confusing, or self-protective. They should not make students fight their way through systems that seem designed around everyone except students.

But the phrase does not just remind universities to care. It quietly changes what students, faculty, and administrators are to one another.

A customer buys something. A provider delivers it. The customer’s satisfaction becomes one of the main ways we know whether the provider did a good job.

This way of thinking works well enough in many parts of life. If I order a meal or buy a plane ticket, I have a pretty good basis for judging the transaction. I know what I wanted. I know whether I got it.

Education is different.

A student often does not yet know what they need. That is not an insult. It is the point. Students go to college to develop forms of judgment they do not already have. William Perry’s classic study of intellectual and ethical development in college students described this as a movement from simpler ways of seeing knowledge toward more complex forms of judgment. Students are learning to think in ways that may not yet come naturally.

That kind of learning cannot simply be delivered. It has to be formed over time, and often through difficulty that may not feel productive in the moment. A hard assignment may feel unreasonable before it becomes useful. Critical feedback may feel discouraging before it becomes clarifying.

The customer model has a hard time with this because it treats present satisfaction as evidence of value. But education often works by challenging present satisfaction.

This does not mean students are always wrong when they are unhappy. Sometimes a course really is poorly designed. Sometimes faculty and institutions hide behind standards when what they are actually doing is failing students.

But the opposite mistake is just as dangerous. We should not assume that because students are frustrated, the educational experience has failed. Sometimes frustration is a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it is a sign that something is being asked of you.

The customer model does not help us tell the difference.

There is some evidence that this matters. In a study published in Studies in Higher Education, Louise Bunce, Amy Baird, and Siân Jones found that a stronger student-as-consumer orientation was associated with poorer academic performance. The point is not that thinking like a customer automatically makes a student worse. The point is that the role seems to matter. When students understand themselves mainly as consumers, something about the learning relationship changes.

That is the part I find most important. “Customer” is not just a word. It is a role.

Sociologists have long argued that roles are not just labels people carry around. Robert Merton used the term “role-set” to describe the web of relationships and expectations attached to a social position. That is a useful way to think about what happens here. When the student becomes a customer, the rest of the university does not stay the same. The role of the student changes, but so does the role of nearly everyone around the student.

The script is familiar enough. The student is the buyer. The university is the seller. The degree is the product. Faculty help deliver it.

Once that script takes hold, it becomes harder to sustain the older idea of education as formation. The student is no longer primarily someone being prepared for forms of judgment they do not yet possess. The student becomes a consumer of educational services.

That may sound empowering, but I think it is often the opposite.

The customer model flatters students by treating their present preferences as authoritative. It tells them they already know what they need. But a serious education depends on the possibility that they do not. It depends on the idea that students can be called into something larger than preference and convenience.

That is why good teaching can feel inconvenient. It asks students to stay with difficulty instead of moving too quickly to complaint, avoidance, or evaluation. It asks them to consider the possibility that discomfort is not always evidence of failure.

None of this means faculty should be above criticism. Faculty should be accountable for the quality of their teaching. They should explain what they are doing and why. They should design courses with care. They should respond to students as human beings.

But taking students seriously is not the same as treating them as customers.

The customer model also changes what faculty are.

Traditionally, universities have depended on a form of professional authority. Henry Mintzberg famously described universities as examples of “professional bureaucracy,” where the core work of the organization depends on trained professionals who exercise judgment within their fields. That does not mean faculty should run everything. It does mean that universities are supposed to depend, in a deep way, on academic expertise.

The student-as-customer model weakens that arrangement.

If students are customers, faculty become service providers. A course becomes a product. Grades become easier to understand as disputed transactions. The question shifts from “What is this course asking me to become capable of doing?” to “Am I getting what I paid for?”

Once that happens, faculty judgment starts to look suspicious whenever it disappoints the customer. Difficulty becomes poor service. Correction becomes disrespect. The professor who challenges a student risks being seen not as someone doing the work of education, but as someone interfering with the delivery of value.

This is also why I find faculty unionization more complicated than the usual debate allows.

Faculty unionization can be a reasonable response to real problems. Shared governance has weakened at many institutions. Administrative authority has grown. Decisions that once felt academic often feel managerial. It is not hard to understand why faculty would seek protection.

Still, there is something revealing about the frame.

Once faculty define themselves primarily as labor, the university has already changed. Faculty are no longer positioned as the central professional authority of the institution. They become workers bargaining with management. That may be legally useful. It may even be necessary in some places. But it also accepts a picture of the university in which the people who teach, research, and preserve academic standards are employees inside an organization run by someone else.

That is the part I find troubling.

The student-as-customer model and the faculty-as-labor model fit together too neatly. In both cases, the university becomes easier to understand as a service organization. Students receive the service. Faculty deliver it. Administrators manage the system.

At that point, it becomes harder to remember what made a university different in the first place.

This is also why the “college as job training” debate matters. The customer model fits naturally with the idea that college is mainly workforce preparation. Students buy education in order to secure employment. Programs are judged by labor market outcomes. Faculty become trainers or content specialists.

Again, none of this is entirely wrong. Most students need college to help them prepare for work. A university that acts as if employment is beneath its dignity is failing many of its students.

But when job preparation becomes the whole story, the university shrinks. It may still use the old language of inquiry, citizenship, wisdom, and formation, but its operating logic points somewhere else.

The problem is not that universities care too much about students. It is that the customer model offers too small an account of what students are.

Students are not just buyers. They are not just future employees. They are people being formed. They are learning how to judge, act, create, question, and take responsibility in ways they may not yet fully understand.

That is why the university should serve students, but not satisfy them in the way a business satisfies customers.

Sometimes serving students means giving them what they would not have chosen. Sometimes it means holding a line they do not yet understand. Sometimes it means telling them that the work is hard because the work is hard, not because the institution has failed them.

And sometimes it means refusing the most flattering lie in higher education, which is that students already know exactly what they need.

The student is not the customer.

The student is the point of the work.

That distinction matters.