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This paper explores and challenges the notion that postsecondary students are products of higher education, shaped and molded for the benefit of future employers. The mere suggestion that students are passive in their consumption of educational services would seem to discount the importance of their own educational identity and the broad repertoire of existing knowledge that they bring with them and build upon during the guided learning experience. Adopting a customer focus, wherein students are valued according to their personal brand rather than their relative usefulness to someone or something else would thus seem preferable. And although critics have long argued that a student-customer model in higher education leads to an erosion of education quality and forces professors to pander to students, this paper questions whether this claim has ever been fully substantiated with empirical evidence.

Advocating a customer focus, the Total Quality Management model of leadership has led to success in raising performance levels throughout various manufacturing and service industries. Many education stakeholders, however, are resistant to the notion that postsecondary students benefit from being treated like customers. While many critics oppose the traditional business philosophy that "the customer is always right" and maintain that pandering to students' short-term demands is damaging to the learning process few studies explore alternative notions of what it means to ensure student satisfaction. This paper promotes a conceptual interpretation that is not governed by the philosophy that "the customer is always right".