Changing Higher Education

Who are our customers for education? II. Society as customer.

(Continuing the discussion of Who are our customers for education? I. The employer as customer.)

"Society" has traditionally been a major "customer" of higher education.  At different times and places, higher education has been called on by society to do such diverse things as help create and/or maintain national identity, display national cultural and intellectual excellence, create societal mobility,  preserve the societal status quo, contribute to economic growth and improved living conditions, fend off and counteract  foreign ideas and influences, and provide critical expertise in times of war.  Thus,  the expectations of society as customer have and will vary according to time and place.  In return for meeting these expectations, higher education (at least the non-profit side) generally has been well rewarded by society. Much of higher education globally traditionally has been run by the state, and thus received the great majority of its support from the state.  Private non-profit institutions have received de facto state support through tax breaks of a variety of types, and are typically eligible for some types and levels of state support.  Thus, the challenge is not to determine whether or not society is one of the customers of higher education- it is - but to define in this rapidly changing and globalizing world what "society" is, and what it expects (and will expect) of higher education.  Further complicating the issue is that "society" has many levels, ranging from governmental structures at one end of organizational complexity to individuals at the other, and the relationships between these, and intervening, levels is also changing rapidly.

Who are our customers for education? I. The employer as customer.

My son Wade has an MBA, which often leads (and enables) him to look at issues with a somewhat different perspective than I.  He recently suggested that it is possible that we in higher education were defining our customers incorrectly.  Perhaps, instead of viewing students and their parents as our customers for education, we should view the future employers of our students as our real customers.  Since I am always advising groups for which I consult to move up one level in abstraction in their thinking, I recognized that this really what my son was suggesting to me.   In this post, I want to follow up on this suggestion, with one addition to his definition of customers: I want to define the real customers of higher education as both future employers, and society generally.  This addition of society to the list of customers enables a broader discussion of the role of higher education in a changing world.

THE EMPLOYER AS CUSTOMER
Let me begin by focusing on the “future employers” component of this definition, turning later to the “society” component.  This customer focus is quite consistent with my earlier post that described higher education as being in the knowledge chain management business(What business are we in?, March 1, 2006).  In that post, I argued that a role that would take on increasing importance for higher education was that of moving new knowledge quickly to potential end users. (That post also discusses other critical aspects of knowledge chain management, such as creation of new knowledge.)  And the best known way to move information, skills and knowledge from one place to another is through an educated person.  Thus, this view changes our relationship with our students, because our graduates become a key part of the knowledge supply chain which moves knowledge from the creators and explicators to the users. In addition, it may create a different kind of long-term relationship with our graduates than now exists.