Students versus customers....the difference matters....a lot!

For much of the last decade, swirling around colleges and universities, at least in North America, and most likely in other regions as well, is the debate over whether students in post-secondary institutions are considered ‘customers’ or ‘students’.

Anyone who has familiar with this space will already ‘know’ that this scribe abhors even the need for the debate, given that students are ‘students’ and they are not customers, clients, patients, nor geopolitical terrorists. We have all both witnessed and participated in the objectification of humans, as numbers of a marketing niche, as cases in emergency rooms, as suppliers and consumers, as ethnicities, as card-carrying denominational religious members, as citizens of a nation, Brits, Scots, Irish, Canadians, Americans, Indians, Aussies….the list is endless.

Much of this objectification emerges from the multiple classifications of people depending on the source of the categories. Service club members take the name of their club, (Rotarians, Lions, Kinsmen, Optomists, Civitans, etc.) And with marketing algorithms delving into the preferences, biases, origins, addresses and customs of every single ‘customer’ of a business enterprise, for the purpose of both enhancing sales, as well as evolving the nature of the business to meet changing demands.

People who are know primarily in and through a religious ‘brand’, or a nation or a social class, or a university ‘brand’  (think He is a Harvard grad, or a Columbia grad, or a Duke grad, of a Saint Francis Xavier (SFX) grad) may be more ‘known’ or presumed to be known by others of the same brand, with the same pedigree.

Distinguishing traits of educational institutions that have attained a high level of corporate or academic ‘status’ analogous to such ‘elevated brands’ such as Lexus, Infinity, Cadillac, Lincoln, BMW, Mercedes, are attempting to create an imaginative link of their institution with such well-known corporate brands largely for the purpose of enhancing the magnetic draw of their institution for a select ‘grade’ of student…..and that grade could involve family donations, (legacy admissions), as well as academic and/or athletic prowess, family connections (grandfather graduated from X)….and the marketing plans are designed to ‘fit’ or comply with the ‘stated and understood’ values, priorities and preferences’ of the institution.

As the culture devolves, (downward certainly) into little more than an unregulated, wild-west kind of frontier of selling, and buying, the various approaches of how to ‘grow’ whatever initiative it is, come from and are sustained by marketing, public relations, communications and persuasion (propaganda?)….At the core of this culture, the pursuit of money, growing numbers, votes, donations, academic test scores, salaries, stock options, ‘value-added proposals’ to enhance the allure, the nature of both the message and the conceptualization of the receiver of whatever is the product or service are highly mutually influential.

In another life, as part of a grade thirteen teaching staff, a proposal was made that three different instructors would offer three different ‘themes’ in literature and make presentations to all grade thirteen students who would then ‘select’ their choice for the semester. Instantly, I recognized the absurdity of this proposal….however, I attempt to participate, reflecting years later on the superficiality and the motivations of many of the choices.

Also in another life, I taught at an Ontario private school, then all-boys, where tuition ranked among the highest in the province. In that culture, the boys were dubbed almost exclusively by their grade or form level or ‘prefect’ as a status symbol and role. Last names were deployed almost exclusively, not only in cases of administering sanctions, presumably in the spirit of making ‘boys-into-men’….

In another life, I was instructing in what are designated as private colleges, where students often partially or fully funded by government programs for skill-development, and I confronted the owner/operator of this operation, (it could be known and designated as nothing more nor less than a for-profit business, where the students were ‘customers.’

“These young men and women have to be considered as students and not as customers,” I recall pleading in his office. His face went blank, as if I were speaking a language with which he was totally unfamiliar. Revenue, costs, resources, even testing were all consuming issues and whatever learning/teaching process was operating, there was at best minimal, if any, discussion of individual student learning preferences. There were basic behavioural skills to learn, most of those skills committed to a kind of recipe, introduced, and followed by practice of the recipe and then testing held tightly to the recipe.

In a ‘police ethics’ course, I attempted to introduce the concept of ambiguity, and a blank slate of expectations, for prospective law enforcement officers, to adopt on their assignment to and entry into a specific situation. The concept was discomfiting for the students, who were determined to ‘know’ where the guilty party was even before entering. Nevertheless, I ‘dreamt’ that one or two might have actually read the section in the prescribed text that detailed the ‘blank-slate- withheld judgement’ notion, and inserted an option question on a test to that end.

The students complained that ‘he tested something he never taught’….and the owner/operator sided with the ‘customers’ because he dreaded losing their fees.

The reductionism of the students was mirrored, and perhaps even endorsed and enhanced by the owner/operator and also, sadly by the retired law enforcement staff instructor.

Today, in America, university and college students have become political ‘weapons’ in the eyes of the Washington administration, and the propaganda war of requiring exclusive support for Israel in the Israel-Gaza war has spilled over not only to the on-campus protests but also into the administration’s withdrawal of billions in order to force the hand of university administrators, to comply with the White House’s demands to control admissions, faculty hiring and the elimination of all initiatives designed to enhance what has come to be known as D.E.I. (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)….all initiatives that were originally designed to enhance racial harmony, and mediate against gender and ethic biases.

While in another life, I worked in a community college, where FSE (Full-Time-Student-Equivalents) was the accounting symbol for the provincial calculation of projected funding. There was then a lag between this years FTE’s and the projected budget funding from the province in two years (if I recall precisely). Engaged in marketing, and focused on enrolment figures, we were regularly comparing and competing with some twenty-plus other colleges which offered many of the same programs as ours did. Attempting to ‘sell’ prospective futures for young adults many of whom were undecided, uncertain, unemployed and somewhat insecure, one of the struggles was to maintain both a language and an attitude of respect, challenge, life-long-learning, opportunity and hope in all public engagements, including trade shows, radio and television messages and student activities.

If the accountants and the bureaucrats needed or wanted to call them FSE’s, that was their choice. When we were designing and implementing initiatives, for example to reduce on-campus smoking, (many young adults were then fully engaged in cigarette smoking, vaping was still on the horizon) these young men and women were considered not only as students, (not customers) whose personal and social health was important, along with many other issues that impacted their experience while they were students…. like gender equality, technical innovation, bilingualism (French-English) and respect between and among students themselves and between and among staff-faculty and students.

Drawing from another moment while working as a secondary school teacher, I listened as Stephen Lewis, then leader of the New Democratic Party of Ontario spoke on a professional development day in the late 1960’s.  His thesis was that legislators had a very narrow, constricted and reductionistic view of the education process: they saw, considered and valued only two numbers: first dollars of cost (provincial and per-student, and second, teacher-student ratios.

Dollars and ratios, thereby, were the subjects for provincial-teacher federation negotiations for contracts. There were a few skirmishes between boards of education and local teachers’ federations over novel titles, especially if there happened to be some passages that fundamentalist Christians considered ‘sexually explicit’….What was once a minimal brush-fire has apparently exploded into an all-out culture war with book-banning a political lever pulled by parents seeking to exert more control over the process of primary and secondary education.

Is there a customer-provider equation operating in that protest movement. Are parents so steeped and indoctrinated into the ‘consumer-customer-provider’ model, that, as customers they have an enhanced ‘right’ to demand the ‘services’ they deem essential for their children for whom they pay those education taxes?

Doubtless, there has to be some impact of that cultural model of both thought and operating.

In this evolving vortex of both language and attitudes about education, impacted by the tidal wave of technology, a pandemic, increasing pressures on state and provincial budgets resulting from the spiraling costs of health care, relegating education to the family pages of daily newspapers (unless there is a violation of professional conduct), leaves the gestalt of learning and education with few if any real advocates or political levers to address these issues, dispassionately.

Every parent has, at one or more times in his/her life been a student. And while many changes have evolved, every parent ‘knows’ what makes a good teacher and a ‘bad teacher.’’And in a highly competitive, transactional, politically charged cultural ethos, where both language and perceptions have been dumbed down to multiple binary either-or propositions, (as if such a reduction were to resolve any complex issue) surely we might agree that students can and should remain students, in their own minds, as well as in the minds of those instructing them as well as those administering their institutions….and even more importantly in the minds and languages of those legislators who can and do too often fall victim to the radical, thoughtless and enflamed extremists whose self-induced political naivety and refusal to see or accept the complexities of even their own child’s learning life fuels their angry protests.

And as for the for-profit owner-operators of private trade and skills colleges, it might be appropriate for legislatures to consider a formal orientation program of not less than three months, prior to the licensing approvals. In that way, at least some basic ‘education’ might be applied to the methods, attitudes, and desire to continue to learn on the part of those leaders who espouse profit at all costs.

Just sayin!