A common refrain these days in (Christian) higher ed goes like this, “We must remember, students are our customers.”
The logic runs as follows:
- Anyone who pays for a good or service is a customer.
- Students and parents often pay (a lot) for education.
- Viewing students as customers is not just accurate but important, since it helps colleges take things like student satisfaction, institutional accountability, and appropriate return on the investment (ROI) seriously.
To be fair, I’m sympathetic to parts of the argument. And its intention can be good.
It’s absolutely right to say that universities must continually evaluate whether they are caring for and training students well. And parents have every right to inquire as to whether the cost of a particular education is worth it. That involves not just how much money a student may earn upon graduation, but the kind of spiritual formation and integrity fostered at the school. Christian colleges that don’t get deadly serious about those points will disappear, and they deserve to.
That said, I reject the idea that students should be viewed primarily as customers.
There are good reasons to believe that points #1 and #3 are wrong, at least in certain cases.
EDUCATION AS DISCIPLESHIP
At its best, Christian education is a form of discipleship.
Jesus was a teacher. And his teaching ministry was funded, at least partly, by students. Luke’s Gospel makes special mention of some female disciples who paid to keep Christ’s teaching ministry going—Mary (called Magdalene), Joanna the wife of Chuza, Susanna, “and many others.” These women, the Gospel tells us, supported the Lord, “out of their own means” (Luke 8:1–3).
Yet if someone were to approach Jesus and refer to these female apprentices as his “customers,” I suspect he’d have harsh words for them. (He might even pull out one of his trademark Jesus-burns that he could get away with, on account of being sinless, but sounds egotistical and mean when I try it.) The reason is self-evident: to speak of Jesus’ disciples as “customers” sounds profane, and it cheapens the relationship between a rabbi and his students.
The problems persist when we turn from Jesus’s teaching ministry to ours.
I currently serve as a Teaching Pastor at a local church. Parishioners (myself included) give monetarily to keep that teaching ministry going—and a portion of that money pays my salary.
Yet that exchange of funds would never drive me to refer to my parishioners as “customers.” To do so sounds odd, it commits a category mistake, and it risks making a pastor-teacher more like false prophets from the Old Testament who espoused the formula, “The customer is always right.”
I’m well aware, of course, that there are differences between the teaching role of Jesus, that of a pastor, and that of a college professor. Yet the above examples are enough to prove that there are indeed spheres of life–one of which is Christian education–in which one invests funds in education without being viewed primarily as a customer or consumer. To the extent that we reject that precedent, Christian ed is secularized. And to the extent that is secularized, it ceases to have sufficient reason to exist.
CONCLUSION
Once again, none of this changes the need for professors and universities to step up their game. And one way to do that is to remind ourselves of the financial cost of college as we strive to go above and beyond for students. That’s right and good.
Yet if the telos of learning is more about formation than consumption, then the student-as-customer model runs contrary to a Christian view of education. It does so, in part, because it wrongly assumes that the only way to serve a person well is to view them as consumers. Yet as Neil Postman argued long ago (see here), that’s precisely the modern heresy we must overcome.
In the end, the problem is not that the student-as-customer approach goes too far in seeking to train and mentor students with excellence, but that it does not go far enough.
It cheapens the nature of the relationship, commits a category error, undermines the purpose of learning, and fails to grasp that there are spheres of life (like family, faith, and education) that must not be flattened by the all-reducing language of the market.
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