Myths of the student: ‘consumers’, ‘customers’, ‘clients’ and implications for teaching
in higher education
Dr Paul Cooper
University of Southampton
Avenue Campus
Highfield
Southampton, Hants
SO17 1BJ
Tel: (023) 8059 3945
Email: pcooper@soton.ac.uk
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Abstract
This paper begins from the recognition of the pivotal importance of teacher-student
relationships in the attainment of successful educational outcomes and high quality
higher education. The paper considers the now widespread claim that students in UK
higher education, as well as in much of HE internationally, should be regarded as
consumers, customers or clients in professional relationships with academics and
universities, as the HE sector itself becomes increasingly construed as a competitive
‘market’. Students’ own views are drawn upon to critique the client-professional model
and to suggest that modes of exchange in educational relationships have more in common
with iterative economic ‘gift’ exchanges rather than with the exchange of a commodity
service between clients and professionals. The potentially corrosive consequences of the
discourse construing students as customers or clients are considered, and the need is
stressed for a discourse of collaborative partnership in high quality educational processes.
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Myths of the student: ‘consumers’, ‘customers’, ‘clients’ and implications for teaching
in higher education
‘[Students] have become consumers of a service and expect instant access to
their service providers’
(Lecturer at a UK university, THES, 23rd March 2007)
Introduction
Lately, hardly a week goes by without the UK educational press reporting on some
aspect of the increasing consumerism and the corporate culture that is seemingly apparent
across the higher education sector, both in the UK and internationally. This trend seems,
if anything, to be gathering pace. In May 2007, the Times higher education supplement
(THES) carried the leader comment: ‘Academics are feeling the impact of increasing
workloads and a customer-comes-first attitude towards students too numerous to put
names to’ (Newman, 4.5.2007, pp. 6-7); there has been any number of similar headlines
since.
The foregoing headline alludes to a fundamental concern for any modern and perhaps
increasingly ‘marketised’ system of higher education; namely, how is it that the
interrelationship between students, teachers, and universities is accurately to be
understood. The accurate designation of such relationships is important for a number of
reasons. For example, the rising cost of university tuition is impacting upon students’
expectations and concerns, and is also of key concern to HEIs in an era in which income
from teaching is increasingly important to future aspirations and prosperity. These
relationships also play into vexed questions of quality assurance and enhancement, league
tables, and indicators of student satisfaction. At the same time, the Office of the
Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), is reporting progressively rising
levels of student complaints, suggesting a more litigious or adversarial mentality
developing among at least some students.
At several levels, it seems broadly uncontroversial to suggest that the relationship
between students, their teachers and HEIs does indeed comprise, in some sense, a series
of ‘exchange relationships’. These exchange processes can be discerned in the give-andtake of information, ideas, competencies and feedback between teachers and students. As
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teachers, we strive to optimally impart or share aspects of knowledge and skills with
students who subsequently typically strive to demonstrate their development and learning
through participation in courses and then in assessment tasks. More recently, of course,
the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 has introduced a form of payment in exchange for
higher education. It is this development perhaps more than anything else that has
prompted in the intervening years the use of such terminology as ‘consumer’, ‘customer’
or ‘client’ to describe students. However, is this development a sufficient condition for
students now to be reconceptualised in these terms?
As academics, we have a vested interest in ensuring that we and our students are clear
as to the nature of the ‘exchange relationships’ and the broader framework in which these
exchanges sit and which characterise educational processes. Moreover, we have an
intellectual duty and a tradition to uphold in striving for clarity of thought and precision
of analysis in this area and indeed generally.
However, what is perhaps most remarkable in contemporary discussions of the
putative nature of educational relationships within HE, within both the educational press
and in scholarly publications, is the degree of variance and ambiguity that is apparent in
attempts to adequately construe such relationships. Consider, for example, the following
comments from certain academics, politicians, and those involved in university
administration and management. As long ago as 1994, Sines & Duckworth (p.2)
remarked: ‘It’s time for educational institutions to face two facts: they are in a
competitive battle for students, and students are customers.’ In 2004, J.R. Shackleton,
Head of the Westminster Business School argued that we must look at higher education
from ‘the consumer viewpoint’, and claimed: ‘Higher education increasingly involves
students… in large financial commitments… The “commodification” of higher education
is here to stay’ (THES, 2.1.2004, p.10). In 2007, the University of East London’s (UEL)
secretary and registrar remarks: ‘Once you think of (students) as service users and get
over the hurdle of whether they are customers, you get over the semantics and into the
essence of it, which is providing good quality services to whoever happens to need them
at the time’ (Swain, 16.2.2007, pp. 54-55). This view is echoed in the words of, for
example, Sir Geoffrey Holland at the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), who
in 2003 felt able to criticize UK higher education for ‘failing to develop the flexibility
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and consumer choice that people expect from other services’, including ‘quality
assurance and money-back refunds or guarantees’.i
Conversely, the Australian academic and management consultant Geoff Sharrock
commented in 2000 that: ‘…in universities and the wider public sector, where users may
not be the only beneficiaries, transactions are not just acts of consumer choice. They are
enactments of social purpose’ (p.152). Sharrock continues: ‘The challenge for
universities is to learn from the disciplines of business without becoming one…’ (ibid.).
In 2008, the head of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), Professor Paul Ramsden, in
an interview for the THE, claimed that: ‘Resisting treating students as consumers and
fostering their sense of being part of a “community of learners” is key to a quality student
experience’ (Attwood, p.16). Whilst Lomas (2007, p.39), cites a lecturer thus: ‘… we
should not let students drive the higher education process because, after all,
they are not buying a degree!’
A feature that is conspicuously absent in many academic discussions of the nature of
educational relationships in the era of tuition fees is the perspective of those perhaps most
directly affected by these developments – the students. Since 1998, I have undertaken an
ongoing series of what amounts now to over 100 recorded semi-structured interviews
with students at UK institutions, including students taking an ‘access’ diploma, others at
a pre-1992 non-Russell Group university, and still others at a Russell Group institution.
In many of these interviews, I have questioned students directly on their view of their
relationships with their education providers and on their putative status as ‘consumers’,
‘customers’ or ‘clients’. In a similar vein to the remarks cited above, the students’ own
views are also often inconsistent and ambiguous, as the following examples illustrate.
A student on a unit of study that I taught in 2007-08 produced an advisory document
for prospective HE students at a school at which he worked as a teaching assistant. One
striking sentence read: ‘You must ask for information on all the things you want to know.
Remember, YOU are a customer now, you should expect to get value for money.’
Another previously remarked: ‘I suppose you are buying your degree, even though you
have to work alongside it. You are basically paying for it’. A further student who, at least
initially, expressed similar views on his status as a ‘customer’ said that he expected the
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university ‘to have an interest in you and provide very good service, because you are
paying for it.’
Others, however, recognise the difficulties inherent holding such a position. One, for
example, suggested that whilst he was concerned to ensure that he received ‘value for
money’, he found this idea problematic in relation to education, because ‘…you don’t
know what value for money is do you?’ Others remark: ‘I don’t see myself as a customer.
I know that were supposed to see ourselves as customers now, but that tutor-pupil
relationship still exists and it’s still to a large extent like being back at school’. An
undergraduate student, when asked recently if, in the age of tuition fees, she views herself
as a customer or client and academics as service providers, similarly disavows the idea
robustly: ‘No, I’ve never thought of it like that… I don’t necessarily think (of the
lecturers) “Oh, I’m giving you my one thousand and whatever pounds a year”. I don’t
necessarily think that. I think they’re just as much in this mess as we are, frankly, except
they’re standing at the front and we’re sitting down taking notes…’
A student cited in a recent interview in the THE observed: ‘I think that the cost of
education has had a huge impact on the way students perceive their education. We have
been forced into a situation where we have become consumers and… are more aware of
the quality of education we receive for our money.’ (Fearn, 1.5.2008, p.34: emphasis
added). Whilst, in the same article, Wes Streeting, the president-elect of the National
Union of students (NUS) comments: ‘The rising consumer mentality, and the detrimental
effects it’s having on the higher education system, is something that academics and vice
chancellors have to bear in mind.’
In light of the variable, and indeed in some cases openly conflicting views cited
above, it seems clear that the notion of whether students are indeed ‘consumers’,
‘customers’ or ‘clients’ is extremely problematic. This is not simply a function of the
novelty of this development or view; tuition fees have been levied in the UK for a decade
now and yet a broadly agreed, clearly stated intellectual position on this important matter
still seems elusive. I maintain that this is a result of a fundamentally poor fit between
both academic and quotidian understandings of categories such as consumer, customer or
client, and those relationships inherent in educational processes.
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As I have remarked earlier, numerous analyses of this issue lack detailed empirical
evidence, certainly from those such as students. Other accounts, notably those in the HE
press, regularly lack theoretical underpinnings. Indeed, several articles and opinion pieces
lack both these elements. What is needed therefore is an account which draws upon both
empirical data and established and credible academic theory, and which satisfactorily
combines both these elements. Later in this paper, I shall posit such an account. First,
though, I shall consider an academic discussion of the concept of ‘the student as client’
which, although lacking empirical evidence for its claims, draws upon established
management theory and serves the twin purposes of clearly elucidating the putative basis
for students being thus considered, whilst also allowing for a critique of why this analysis
is ultimately inadequate.
Myths of the student: ‘consumers’, ‘customers’, ‘clients’
Too often, the appellation to students of the terms consumer, customer or client is
presented as a simple matter of uncontroversial fact. Similarly, there is often little by way
of detailed discussion of the potential consequences for educational relationships of
recasting students in these terms. Whilst similarly not attempting to elucidate the
consequences for pedagogy and for educational relationships, and despite also lacking
empirical data from those such as students in support of his claims, Jeffrey Bailey (2000)
at least offers a more sustained consideration of the specific designation of students,
suggesting that students and university academics be seen as being in a clientprofessional relationship, as distinct to that of customer-service provider, a view echoed
also by Scott (1999).
From the outset, Bailey is clear that the classification of students which he endorses is
as that of ‘client’ rather than ‘customer’. These terms are not simply interchangeable, as
the notion of ‘customer’ implies an essentially basic, impersonal and swift mode of
exchange aimed at achieving ‘customer satisfaction’. The purpose here is to consider the
extent to which Bailey’s student-as-client model is any more successful and less
problematic than that which views students as customers.
Bailey’s argument for regarding students as clients rests on a number of claims,
several of which are at least superficially persuasive. Bailey notes that the concept of a
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‘client’ differs from that of a ‘customer’ essentially due often to important differences of
degree (2000, p. 355). Notable among these differences is that a client’s relationship with
a provider of professional services is typically characterised by, for example, a high
degree of professionalism in the invoking of specialist knowledge that is predicated upon
extensive training. The client-professional relationship unfolds within frameworks of
standards, ethics, rights and responsibilities, and all in the context of a professional
‘occupational community’. Furthermore, ‘professions are devoted to the service of the
public above and beyond material incentives’. Bailey continues: ‘professional-client
relationships frequently involve clients placing a high degree of confidence in the beliefs,
decisions, and advice of the professional on whose services the client has called’ (2000,
p. 355).
The features Bailey describes result, he suggests, in client-professional relationships
that are more personal and substantial than those between customer and sales clerk, and
which are likely to persist over time. Such relationships will display also a high degree of
trust and interdependency. Professional relationships of the kind to which Bailey refers
may often entail potentially very significant consequences for clients (2000, p.356).
There will also be a degree of mutual respect in client-professional relationships, and a
substantial absence of ‘customer clichés’ such as ‘the customer is always right’ and ‘the
customer is king’ (2000, p. 357). Client-professional relationships are predicated on a
high degree of interaction, with clients ‘actively involved in the creation and enactment
of the service’ (2000, p. 356).
However, it is in this last respect that cracks begin to appear in Bailey’s position;
indeed Bailey’s arguments tend towards circularity. He suggests that professionals want
‘to effectively educate clients’ and it therefore follows that relationships in the context of
university education are professional relationships. Similarly, clients will be willing to
contribute ‘considerable work’ and be ‘stretched towards goals that benefit the client’.
Thus, ‘[t]he client metaphor implies expectations more in accord with learning goals’
(2000, p. 356). By virtue of their demonstrating the desire of the ‘client’ for hard work,
together with the aspiration towards the attainment of results that take the form of
‘learning goals’, students can therefore be regarded as clients, as clients are themselves
regarded as analogous to students.
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In suggesting that the relationship between students and academics is closer to that of
client-professional than to that of, say, customer-sales clerk, Bailey undoubtedly makes a
number of judicious and insightful points. However, as the remarks at the conclusion of
the previous paragraph suggest, the client-professional analogy in the context of
educational processes begins to look weaker the more closely it is scrutinised. In fact,
there are several problems with Bailey’s account which, in part, derive from the
‘important matter of degree’ that he suggests often distinguishes client-professional
relationships from those of the customer-sales clerk (2000, p. 355). When contrasting
client-professional relationships with those relationships specifically characterising
educational processes, it becomes clear that, in important matters of degree, Bailey’s
position looks much less convincing.
Bailey displays something of a tendency to romanticise client-professional
relationships. Professionals seem to be represented rather as possessing knowledge and
wisdom, and to whom clients appear to come somewhat diffidently to avail themselves of
the expertise and teachings of those more enlightened than they. The author’s 12 years’
experience both of serving as a professional and dealing with professionals in the role of
client in numerous commercial contexts, together with over a decade of experience of
teaching in both higher education and in schools suggests that Bailey’s view is
problematic. Direct experience suggests that, whilst concurring with some of what Bailey
describes, client-professional relationships are regularly fairly passive in nature on the
client’s part, and can often be highly utilitarian and instrumental. Indeed, in business it is
not uncommon for such relationships to become antagonistic and even occasionally
adversarial.
Bailey (2000, p. 356) clearly suggests that, certainly in educational contexts,
professors qua ‘professionals’ should eschew the making easy of high grades and hence
of ‘customer satisfaction’. The obvious corollary of this is that we must assume that
client-professional relationships have about them a quality by which the attainment of
success is not easy and must be striven for on the part of both client and professional; a
sort of ‘no pain, no gain’ conception of the client-professional relationship. In certain
cases there may be something in this, but in many typical client-professional relationships
in commercial contexts, such cases are in fact the exception rather than the rule.
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When, in business, one calls upon a professional such as, for example, a solicitor,
architect or accountant, one typically has no desire that these exchanges become
protracted and mutually demanding and in which one’s own personal development will
be forged by dint of hard work and input. To the contrary, one’s desire is typically that
the professional service is expedited effectively, in accordance with one’s requirements
and to the expected professional standards and for a reasonable fee. Certainly, as Bailey
suggests, there may be some transfer of knowledge inherent in these processes, but this is
typically peripheral and is very much an adjunct to the provision of the professional
service in question, to a client whose role can often be essentially passive.
Whilst Bailey clearly acknowledges the potentially very significant consequences for
clients arising out of client-professional relationships, he seems neither to acknowledge
nor recognise the often singular degree to which specifically educational processes and
the relationships therein have the capacity to influence and to transform the lives and very
identities of individuals, and the extent to which this potential renders experiences of
education unique. Moreover, the extent to which educational processes require the active
input of both students and teachers typically surpasses, in both extent and duration, that
of the input of ‘clients’ in any other form of professional relationship in which one might
ordinarily become involved (Cooper, 2007). Bailey notes that differences in degree are
ultimately sufficiently important to render customer relationships distinct to those
between clients and professionals (2000, p.355). However, he appears unable to
recognise that differences in degree in turn render educational relationships distinct to
client-professional relationships as he construes them.
As has already been noted, students’ views on educational relationships are far from
unambiguous, with many holding highly equivocal opinions of their status as customers
or clients, and many repudiating this idea vigorously. Moreover, this variation appears to
hold true substantially independent of academic discipline (Cooper, 2004). For example,
Larissa, a PhD student in management, reflects on client-professional relationships on the
basis both of her own research and that she belongs to a family who are ‘all lawyers’:
‘I think what’s funny is that, like you, I actually research the idea of the clientservice relationship but I don’t see (education) like that at all… Where I see the
difference is that my parents provide a service, however the client is not really
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directly in touch with that. Yes, you go to court or organise a deal… but even so
the client never gets to actually deal with the contract, other than sign it, and be
assured by the lawyer that it’s done well. But (education) is different. You are
actually trusting another person to educate you and therefore give you the
knowledge to do what my father is doing now… So I don’t see any relation to any
other current client-service provider relationship.’
Further problems attend Bailey’s arguments also. For example, Bailey’s analysis
evidently considers only those engaged in acquiring a university education as constituting
‘clients’ in a client-professional relationship with academics. The designation of solely
this class of students in the category of client appears arbitrary. Bailey speaks of clients
as being active participants in professional relationships and of their willingness to be
stretched towards ‘learning goals’. These relationships are often characterised by
significant personal consequences and are set in the context of frameworks of ethics and
responsibilities. Yet surely all this is true of even the youngest pupils in schools?
Bailey is thus faced with two unavoidable objections. First, on the basis of what
specific qualifying criterion or criteria is the designation ‘client’ being applied solely to
university students? Second, if the overwhelming majority of students in educational
relationships prior to university cannot reasonably be deemed ‘clients’ what, under
Bailey’s model, is the status of students in their educational relationships with teachers
before they do indeed become ‘clients’?
There is nothing in Bailey’s analysis to suggest he has an answer to either of these
objections. It seems that the former issue, that of the criteria upon which students are
adjudged to be clients, is redundant in virtue of the essential inappropriateness of the
client-professional model in educational processes, a model which is rejected by many
students and perceived as problematic by almost all when discussed at length. However,
nothing in the above critique should be taken to imply that educational relationships
between students and teachers, whether in universities or elsewhere, are not
‘professional’ relationships. The characteristics noted by Bailey (2000, p. 355), such as
the typically extended duration of professional relationships; their unfolding within
frameworks of ethics, rights and responsibilities; the presence of an ethos of service; the
existence of highly expert ‘occupational communities’, and so forth; are all substantially
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apt and applicable to HE and other educational contexts. It is the designation of students
as ‘clients’ within educational processes that is flawed.
In what follows, then, an answer is proposed to the question of how, in educational
contexts, the relationships between students and professional teachers might legitimately
be construed, whether at university or indeed before.
Exchange relationships in educational processes
Ultimately, Bailey (2000) paints a confused picture of relationships within
educational contexts. Whilst academics and teachers are undoubtedly ‘professionals’, for
both personal and pedagogic reasons few in academe will relish the prospect of
relationships with their students moving perhaps onto a basis in which there is a greater
risk of students becoming increasingly passive, occasionally adversarial, and in which the
designation of ‘client’, appears perhaps significantly at odds with both students’ and
teachers’ conceptions of educational relationships prior to arriving at university.
Bailey rightly suggests that the ‘student-as-customer’ model is inaccurate and
unhelpful. It is argued here that, for a variety of reasons, the ‘student-as-client’ model is
similarly vitiated. The shortcomings in Bailey’s arguments stem not from a failure to
appreciate the characteristics of client-professional relationships. Rather, what Bailey
lacks is the insight to recognise that the client-professional model, based as it is upon the
transfer of commodity services in a market context, is unapt when applied to high quality,
effective educational processes and the specific nature of the relationships therein. The
question then becomes one of seeking to accurately describe the characteristics of
educational relationships such that the respective status of students and professional
teachers is revealed.
In seeking such an account, it is wise to listen to the views of students on how they
conceptualise educational processes. Across the range of student informants, there is
considerable consistency in aspects of students’ accounts. Many students attest to the role
and influence of teachers in motivating their engagement with academic work and the
effects this may have on their performance, together with the sense they have of being
involved in a reciprocal relationship with their teachers. Jess, for example, is
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unambiguously of this view and is representative of the views of others in a number of
key respects:
‘If you have a fantastic lecturer, who’s really enthusiastic about the subject, and a
really interesting person to listen to, and is helpful both inside and outside of the
lecture environment, you will want to go out and buy the books that you need for
the course, because you will want to read it and find out more because of that
tutor... I think university and the relationships between tutors and students is very
important... it’s exceedingly important.’
Matt comments in similar terms:
‘There are certainly lecturers that inspire me to have an interest in a particular
subject, and conversely there are others that leave me completely cold… It’s
maybe a reciprocal thing. If somebody’s prepared to put that effort in and go
slightly beyond the normal boundaries, then you feel you should at least make the
effort to look at what they’re saying… it may be a desire to please someone who
you feel, not a debt to them, but I think you are more inclined to put the effort in
if you feel that somebody really wants you to do well and do the best that you can.
Then… I feel more of an obligation to do the best that I can.’
Jess’s and Matt’s comments draw attention to several significant issues. Students
regularly acknowledge something approaching a personal commitment to their most
valued teachers, who they regard as having an equivalent commitment to them. This
commitment is manifest in at least three principal ways, all alluded to by Jess. First, there
is an appreciation by students of the efforts made on the part of the teacher to teach and to
engage with students to the best of his or her ability. Second, the student is often
motivated by this to engage with the subject matter and the teacher in a committed and
enthusiastic manner. Third, students acknowledging these two characteristics of
educational processes will typically be likely to give of their best in completing such
tasks and assignments as are set by the teacher.
There is an established corpus of social and economic theory which considers the
characteristics of particular forms of exchange relationships and which readily allows for
the sorts of views expressed by students such as Jess, Matt and many others. The three
elements Jess and Matt allude to constitute a precise analogue to the threefold reciprocal
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obligations first identified by Marcel Mauss in 1925 in specific forms of economic
exchange, and which have informed understandings of social processes of acquisition and
exchange in certain societies ever since (Malinowski, 1992 [1922]; Mauss, 1974 [1925];
Sahlins, 1972; Gregory, 1982; Strathern, 1988; Bloch & Parry, 1989; Carrier, 1993, 1995;
Cooper, 2004; Foster, 2005). Mauss’s threefold reciprocal obligations to give, to receive,
and to repay, are in fact features at the heart of classical understandings of economic
relationships predicated upon gift exchange.
Academic analyses of processes of gift exchange comprise other elements also, and
these are similarly apparent in effective educational processes. For example, that which is
given as gift retains an inalienable quality and something of the personality or essence of
the giver: which of us does not recall a great teacher, or indeed a remarkable student? As
Paul Ramsden, head of the HEA, recently remarked: ‘That’s what (students) remember –
the inspirational lecturers, the knowledge they gained, the sense of empowerment it gave
them’ (THE, 22.5.2008, p.16).
In contrast to the impersonal amorality typically characterising commodity
transactions and the acquisition of many commodity services, gift exchanges are further
construed as fundamentally moral in nature. Again, this is clearly mirrored in the respect
regularly extended by students to their teachers and in teachers’ concerns for students’
well-being and progress to their fullest potential. Gift exchange relationships are also
typically marked by protracted durations and this is again echoed in the long-term
educational relationships often formed between teachers and students (Cooper, 2004).
It is to features such as these and to economic understandings of gift exchange that
we should profitably turn in seeking to discern a viable analogy or metaphor to the
fundamental characteristics of effective educational processes and the relations obtaining
between teachers and students. Whilst it may perhaps be unhelpful in practical terms to
portray educational relationships as directly akin to the sorts of gift exchanges with which
most of us are readily familiar, an analysis rooted in economic understandings of gift
exchange processes allows for our talking of educational processes as taking place within
highly socialised and collaborative professional contexts. We should thus strive to speak
of educational exchange relationships as ones of ‘collaborative partnership’ involving
both students and teachers reciprocally (Cooper, 2004).
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Conclusions
Contemporary political discourse, together with that emanating increasingly from
within the academy, is applying ever-greater pressure upon universities, teachers and
students alike to conceive of themselves as respectively the providers of and recipients of
a professional commodity service. Should this rhetoric become progressively internalised
to a point where it becomes the accepted idiom in which to speak of a university
education, this may entail real risks to educational quality and to relationships as
experienced by both teachers and students. Those in universities may be obliged ever
more forcefully to regard ourselves and to behave as if commercially motivated and
engaged in the delivery of a commodity service to paying ‘clients’ which, though perhaps
a superficially attractive scenario, may entail all of the risks described above, and more.
It will come as little comfort to those in UK higher education to realise that there are
other professions involved in the delivery of what were once conceived of as services for
the public good, which now similarly see their professional relationships eroded by the
misplaced rhetoric of marketization and the focus upon ‘customers’ or ‘clients’. In
remarks that sound ominously prescient for the future of higher education, Dr Jacky
Clark, a consultant radiologist, speaks of the UK National Health Service (NHS) as
follows:
‘The NHS chief executive, Nigel Crisp, has said that foundation trusts “should
adopt the same marketing techniques as Tesco in their bids to win customers in
the new choice-based NHS market”… In a system where, as a CEO recently told
his managers, every part of the business must generate a surplus, patients will
come second to profits.’ (27.6.2005, p. 18)
What Clark recognises in these concerns over the fate of the NHS, but which I fear
the likes of Bailey, Shackleton and Holland do not recognise in the client-professional
and commodity service model of professional relationships they advocate in the context
of higher education, is that there are modes of professional exchange relationships other
than those delineated in terms of services provided to customers or clients in accordance
with the workings of the free market (Cooper, 2004). Moreover, such modes of exchange
can function perfectly well even where money is exchanged in payment. This requires,
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though, that the essential characteristics of such exchanges are understood and supported
by discourse and management practices that reinforce and do not undermine the social
relationships therein.
However, there is already growing evidence in press reporting of UK higher
education of precisely the undesirable consequences of the marketization of HE and of
the prevalence of the customer- or client-professional rhetoric critiqued here. Moves
aimed at ‘curbing students’ rights’ are reported in the THES (Newman, 13.7.2007, p. 1,
& pp. 4-5), with the remark: ‘It seems that the backlash by universities against the
growing concept of fee-paying students as “customers”, with full consumer rights, has
begun in earnest.’ The Secretary of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) says in the
same article: ‘UCU members rightly worry that top-up fees will create a generation of
customers rather than learners. They know that an industry approach to higher education
has the potential for terrible consequences for the sector.’ In the same segment (p. 5), a
student remarks on concerns over getting one’s ‘money’s worth’, and speaks of students
as being ‘shafted by tutors’ research and other commitments’. The THES (17.8.2007)
leads on page one with: ‘Big rise in students seeking redress’.
However, the imposition by some universities of legalistic measures aimed at
protecting themselves and constraining the rights of students is likely only to further
reinforce an instrumentalist and possibly adversarial view of higher education provision,
and to foster an increasing disposition among students to expect more from their ‘service
providers’ whilst diminishing the expectations of their own role in the educational
process. Students will be likely in turn to generate their own ‘backlash’. Thus, the quality
of the educational experience for both students and academics risks being gravely
undermined.
The model of effective relationships in educational processes that Bailey and others
seek is revealed, then, not as that between ‘client’ and ‘professional’ engaged in the
acquisition and provision of commodity services, but rather between mutually supportive
partners engaged in education itself conceived of as an active, iterative and
fundamentally social process akin to the economic conception of gift exchange. Such a
model simultaneously reconciles the roles and responsibilities of all parties in educational
processes and allows for the reinforcement and enhancement of educational quality via a
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collaborative discourse of cooperation, and emphasises also the need for positive
contributions on the parts of all concerned.
Notes
i
Cited from an online BBC News report on 19 February 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk
References
Attwood, R., 2007, ‘Big rise in students seeking redress’. Times higher education
supplement, 17th August, 1.
- 2008, ‘We must focus on students as learners’, Times higher education, 22nd May, 16
Bailey, J., 2000, ‘Students as clients in a professional / client relationship’, Journal of
management education, 24 (3), 353-365.
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