Business students as customers? "It’s a myth"
BUSINESS schools need to reappraise their view of students as ‘customers’, and focus more on the outcomes that businesses want when they send their staff on MBA courses, according to a leading marketing academic.
Professor Nigel F Piercy, Professor of Marketing & Strategy and Associate Dean at Warwick Business School, says increasing student fees and the age of austerity seems to be encouraging the re-emergence of “the hoary myth that students are “customers” and should be treated as such”.
In a hard-hitting paper published on the WBS website, Prof Piercy said the approach led to the over-indulgence of students at the expense of academic excellence and e needs of employers. Surveys of students’ satisfaction scores pertaining to courses and individual lecturers was of limited real value, he said.
He said: “Left unchallenged, the myth of student customer is lethally dangerous to the values and contributions of educational programmes in business and management. It may account for some of the problems now faced by business schools.
However, in the context of business school students, and MBA students in particular, the myth of student as customer can quickly be dispelled, since it rests on a very incomplete and flawed understanding of “customer”.
“Apart from any other considerations, marketing strategists in the real world, where these things do matter quite a lot, have reached the conclusion that generally “delighted” or highly satisfied customers are often highly unprofitable as well.
“Those who are on the receiving end of business school teaching are certainly users, and often recommenders, but this does not make them customers.”
This suggests that if there is a customer in this process it is the employer or society in general, who pays the real costs of the educational process over the longer term.
“Incentives to faculty to be popular with students because they are “customers” will at best lead teachers to undertake behaviours that make them more popular with students. Perhaps a better idea would be to incentivize the stimulation and motivation of students to learn, to acquire and apply new knowledge, to develop deeper analytical understanding of important issues? Now, that would be different.
Prof Piercy accepted that most employers cared about educational standards, “But most hirers couldn’t care less about whether students were happy little bunnies in the classroom who loved their lecturers. They are probably more interested in the capabilities of the people they may recruit. “
