Are Students Customers? the Metaphoric Mismatch between Management and Education

As teachers, we encourage our students to examine the way they use language. Too often, we sidestep this recommendation and avoid subjecting our own linguistic habits to critical scrutiny. This essay examines the equation of students with customers, an equivalence that has gained popularity as total quality management (TQM) has infused educational institutions. Increasingly, metaphors that originate beyond education are being imported to describe and direct educational processes. The importation of terminology from management theory raises several issues central to how education is conceptualized and practiced. Closer attention to the student-as-customer metaphor generates warnings about the unreflective transfer of language from business to education. By exploring the limits of "student as customer" or "student as consumer," the range of the metaphor's applicability to education will be tested. Does conceptualizing students as customers represent a useful extension of management terminology to education, or does it resemble a "colonization," an attempt "to impose a foreign worldview, as a language shapes reality for those who use it" (Baldwin, 1994, p. 125)? The Application of Management Theory to Education The first sentence in a recent book describing the application of total quality management to higher education states: "problems in American higher education can be directly attributed to the lack of vision, lack of insight, and the lack of skill of many administrators who lacked any formal, even informal, management training" (Cornesky et al., 1992, p. 7). Presumably, training in management will solve problems in higher education because they are attributable to the absence of such training. Naturally this pronouncement fails to account for several factors. Many businesses, the primary repositories of trained managers, routinely encounter problems no amount of management training can solve. Furthermore, higher education fared quite well for centuries before the term 'management' was applied to business and before management courses found their way into college catalogues. The total quality movement in education extends W. Edwards Deming's philosophy of management from manufacturing to service-oriented settings (Dobyns & Crawford-Mason, 1994). By the 1990s, the battle cry of competition resounded in educational circles much as it did for American industries in the 1980s (Coate, 1993). TQM now has become "the rage" in higher education (Fisher, 1993, p. 15). Responding to market pressures similar to those that had operated on American corporations, educational reformers have seen an urgent need for America to keep pace with other industrialized nations in basic skills. Inefficiency, reduced competitiveness with other nations (Beaver, 1994), and dissatisfaction with performance closely resembled complaints leveled against American businesses. Similar problems seem to mandate similar solutions. If TQM could work for American business, it could work for American education. Customer orientation forms a cornerstone of TQM philosophy. Quality is defined in terms of customer satisfaction: the customer's judgment not only determines how quality is measured but how it is defined in the first place (Peters, 1987; Fenwick, 1992). In higher education, the vocabulary of TQM brings assumptions of equivalencies: students are customers or consumers, and educational institutions should apply principles of customer service gleaned from businesses. Given the success of TQM in reducing defects in manufacturing and in improving customer service, the question arises: "If we can do it for widgets, why not for students?" (Brigham, 1993, p. 47) The record of TQM's effects in service industries has been spottier than in manufacturing, so some commentators have urged caution in applying total quality concepts to education (Brigham, 1993; Keller, 1992; Fisher, 1993). The issue of how well the language and methods of corporate management apply to higher education assumes great importance, especially as colleges and universities face financial straits and competition similar to those plaguing American businesses. …