Students Are Not Products. They Are Customers

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.