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Students relax during a break
Students relax during a break from lectures. 'In students are people; people we should help to learn.' Photograph: Jon Parker Lee / Alamy/Alamy
Students relax during a break from lectures. 'In students are people; people we should help to learn.' Photograph: Jon Parker Lee / Alamy/Alamy

Let students be students – not customers

This article is more than 8 years old
It is strange for universities to treat learners as customers at a time when businesses are trying to treat customers as learners

When the University of Bologna started offering tuition in the 11th century, there arose what we would now call a snag in the business plan. Knowledge could not be sold as it was considered a gift from God. However, students paid the teachers a “collectio”, a voluntary gift, and over time these donations became salaries. Inevitably some students did not pay, but in those instances the city authorities would usually stump up. Most of the learners were part-time mature students working as archdeacons and canons of cathedrals, since civil and canon law were the core of the curriculum. So you see, there is nothing new about “earn while you learn”.

This tension between education as something that transcends grubby commercialism and yet costs money to deliver is very much alive today. The higher education debate in the runup to the general election so far appears to be defined in terms of what the cost of a degree should be. Now, the University of the West of Scotland has controversially suggested it might reimburse students who fail their degree. What kind of model of the learner does a money-back guarantee imply? Additionally, the consumer rights bill, which applies to universities, is scheduled to become law this year.

Wanting to call students something other than “students” has always seemed suspect to me. Calling them “customers” superficially appears to empower students, but in fact it disempowers them by restricting how we treat them and discuss them, and how they perceive themselves.

It seems strange to exhort universities to treat learners as customers at a time when businesses are increasingly trying to treat customers as learners. Business analysts are reflecting buying patterns relating to knowledge and learning: “instant skills” has been identified as one of the major consumer trends for 2015. The idea is that there is a relative shift away from “having” to “creating”. Successive generations are spending less on things and more on experiences, desiring collaboration, creativity and transparency. Collaboration versus conformity no longer maps neatly on to education versus business. Students are not yet at the heart of the system but they are at the heart of the debate about what higher education actually is.

The stakes here are higher than merely the last word at a marketing seminar. Access to big data means that some customers’ demographic and purchasing details are worth much more than any one purchase they might make. Last year Twitter made $70m from selling user data to third parties, while Visa and Mastercard both have separate business divisions dedicated to this. Recently Educause, the non-profit education IT analyst, has highlighted in its briefings to US campus leaders that selling student data to advertisers or employers is a potential part of any business plan for a Mooc (massive online open course) given the free access they offer. Analysts say that data is the new oil – and students generate a lot of data.

If universities really treated students as customers, wouldn’t they be ready to sell that data to the highest bidder? But that is not where we should be going. As Jer Thorp at Harvard Business School has argued, quite apart from the ethics and the need for new models of ownership of data, we need to see data not as a commodity but as a completely new resource. For me, that must begin with seeing students as the principal owners of their own data, not those with the technology to harvest it.

Seeing students as customers in the traditional sense narrows our perceptions of them, the potential for their relationship with their university and the kind of help from which they would benefit. A student who struggles to engage isn’t a business problem but a human being who perhaps needs someone to talk to, and to listen. In any event, students are not the sole beneficiary of the knowledge they acquire. Their potential contribution to society at large sits uncomfortably with narrow notions of the consumer.

In the end, students are people; people we should help to learn, even if occasionally there is nothing in it for institutions, because often there will be absolutely everything in it for them. As the municipality of Bologna knew, it is not how the education is paid for that matters. It is about education and what it can do for a whole population, and for its history.

  • Patrick McGhee is assistant vice-chancellor at the University of Bolton

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