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.

In this view, the job of higher education is to provide the student with skills and knowledge that will enable the future employer to better succeed in a knowledge economy.  Before my faculty colleagues leap to the attack over this “professionalization” of the aims of higher education, let me make two points in defense of this view: 1) there is still the “societal” customer of education to be considered, so additional goals may be appropriate; and 2) I think that there is more agreement than some might think between the educational desires of future employers and the educational goals of most faculty, at least if we focus on research universities.  Almost all leaders with whom I have spoken of companies looking for new hires from the research universities want graduates who have mastered their subject, of course, but they also challenge us because they find our graduates can’t write or speak well enough, do not think critically or creatively enough, and don’t know enough about the world outside their field.  Surely, most of us in universities would agree that meeting those desires would be in keeping with our highest academic aspirations.

In addition, if we are focusing on our graduates as being part of the knowledge supply chain that we manage, we know that we need to better enable them to keep their knowledge up-to-date in a rapidly changing environment.  Thus, more focus on learning how to learn is called for during the student years, and subsequent widespread availability of top quality continuing education increasingly will be imperative.  One might imagine a simplified model in which the initial educational experience emphasizes  development of fundamental basic skills that will have lifetime utility such as critical thinking, creativity, entrepreneurship, communication, cultural understanding, etc.  Much of this may well be best taught within the context of a relatively deep disciplinary study, of course, but the emphasis would be on developing core intellectual skills rather than coverage of disciplinary material.  This stage would then be followed by a life-long sequence of “just-in-time” educational experiences that would focus first on mastery of some disciplinary area, and subsequently on keeping up with changing fields of knowledge, and upgrading knowledge for larger responsibilities.      

Of course, the students (and the graduates) are not employees of the college or university.  Rather they are “independent partners” who have invested in an education that will enable them to become valued contributors to their institution’s knowledge chain.  It is they who both reap much of the financial benefits of the chain by providing the desired knowledge to the end customer, and also create much of the brand value of the institution’s knowledge chain through their ability to use their education to meet the needs of the end customer, the employer.   

As the knowledge economy increases in complexity, the continuing, just in time component of the educational process will grow in importance.   The institution can attempt to increase the value of its own knowledge chain by attracting the graduates of other institutions into its chain through effective and visible continuing education.  Conversely, graduates of one institution can attempt to affiliate themselves with a stronger brand chain through choice of continuing education. Obviously, the “independent partners” will be able to participate in multiple chains as desired in order to maximize their own visibility and effectiveness.  From the perspective of the institution of higher education, maximum brand creation will result if its own graduates can be kept exclusively in its own chain, and successful graduates of other institutions can be drawn into the chain. Thus one might envisage that competition in quality and scope of  continuing education might soon become a significant element of higher education.

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

Comments

[Lloyd]

Thanks for you good comments, Bill. However, I am a great fan of the work of Clay Christensen at Harvard BS. He argues that companies fail if they do not understand the job that their clients are hiring their product to do. My effort in this set of posts is to look at who is hiring us to do what. The stakeholder approach, valuable as it is, is our traditional way of viewing the issue. I believe that we need to re-look at much of what we do from different perspectives if we are to handle effectively the changing environment for higher education.

[Bill Bailey]

Supplier customer relationships in higher education are complex. Certainly, students, potential employers and society all enjoy the role of customers at times, but so do faculty. Students are customers of the university, and should rightly expect certain outcomes for their money. But, they are also part of the process, so they must bear part of the responsibility. In a classroom setting, the professor is the customer of the student's work, even though the student is a customer of the university. When the professor provides feedback on a completed assignment, the student again becomes customer. Since the term "customer" is so prone to strike a nerve among academics, I suggest that we not use it at all. We all know what stakeholders are, and that they are entitled to certain expectations. If we focus conversations on the stakeholder, they will be much more productive.