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Opinion: Why students should be treated as paying customers
Declaring that higher education is a commodity and students are customers is no way to win friends in the education sector. But it is a debate worth having – and one that is regularly fuelled by none other than the Australian Government Department of Education and Training with their annual Student Experience Survey. In any other sector, we may well call this a customer satisfaction survey.
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Yes and No. Yes, the customers must get value for money, something that may take a few years to establish. Also, No, the customer is not always right.
Rather than referring to students as customers, I prefer to look more broadly at identifying the various stakeholders associated with higher education. If you do that, then it is quickly apparent that genuinely respecting the needs of students underpins the capacity for all stakeholders to be satisfied in the long term!