Exploring a Customer Orientation: Free-Market Logic and College Students

Abstract

This article provides a synthesis of literature on the conceptualization of students as customers and connects the rise of this understanding of students to the expansion of free-market logic into higher education. It details the ways in which the customer orientation appears to be incongruent with the educational lives of college students, and explores the impacts of a customer orientation on students’ educational behaviors and decisions. The conclusion calls for reliable research on the extent to which students actually express a customer orientation and for efforts to resist this orientation and its inherently negative implications.

They do not buy it: exploring the extent to which entering first-year students view themselves as customers

“…Having previously discussed the manifestations of neoliberal ideology in higher education in the USA (Saunders, 2010) as well as the existing literature that is particularly germane to student as customers (Saunders, 2014), this literature review will focus more narrowly on the limited existing empirical literature concerning students as customers. Readers are encouraged to engage with those articles to gain a more conceptual understanding of the relationships between tenets of neoliberal ideology and students as customers, as well as the historical and theoretical arguments concerning students as customers.…”

“…I modified three items from existing instruments for use in this study; two from Delucchi and Korgen (2002), 'If I'm paying for my college education, I'm entitled to a degree' and 'I would take a course in which I would learn a little or nothing but would receive an A', and one from Finney and Finney (2010), 'As a student, I believe that my role is that of a customer of the university'. I created the bulk of the items through a process that began with an initial examination of the specific manifestations of a customer orientation that scholars have previously identified through their largely theoretical or anecdotal research (see Saunders (2014) for a thorough review of this body of literature). For example, Clayson and Haley (2005) stated, 'with a student as customer perspective, not securing a good job can be seen as the fault of the service providers ' (pp.…”

The marketing orientation as a university management philosophy: a framework to guide its application

“…Nevertheless, the proposal of a management approach which includes customer orientation among its cornerstones keeps open the debate as to who the university customer is, as well as to the consideration that students are customers (Marzo et al 2007; Rivera-Camino and Molero Ayala 2010; Woodall et al 2014;Koris and Nokelainen 2015), and has put on its guard a critical sector that fears a possible deterioration in student training if universities perceive students as such (Mägi et al 2012;Saunders 2014). Both matters reveal that, despite the efforts made by different authors to operationalize the marketing concept in the HE field, more reflection is needed in order to move on and put forward proposals that enhance theory-building, facilitate application of the marketing concept in this area and encourage an understanding of marketing philosophy as an approach suitable for the management of universities where both their managers and their staff are concerned.…”

“…So, many teachers are reluctant to countenance students as university customers (Winter and O'Donohue 2012) and a host of arguments have been put forward to explain how unsuitable the use of this term is in the HE context. The works by Eagle and Brennan (2007) and Saunders (2014) contain review of the main critiques. Reference is made to asymmetries of knowledge between customer and supplier, as students do not know how to approach with precision what they really need in their training process.…”

“…Meanwhile, our knowledge of the degree to which students see themselves as customers is scant (Saunders 2014). One of the recent studies in this regard (Koris and Nokelainen 2015) concludes that students expect to be treated as customers in some, but not in all, categories of the educational experience.…”