Debate (Part 1): Be it resolved; Treating students like customers improves educational quality (Opening Statements)

By Gonsalves & Lovisa | We engaged in a friendly debate presented in three parts as follows; Opening; Rebuttal; and Closing. Your vote picks the winner, fill out the poll at the end of each post.

Written by Neil Gonsalves & Don Lovisa for Seeking Veritas | Sankarsingh-Gonsalves Productions

(Angry image generated by AI using Chat GPT - We are named it Alfred Hitchcock Presents a debate on Education. Note: No friendships were harmed in the exchange of these arguments)

Resolution: Be it resolved; Treating students like customers improves educational quality

Arguing the Affirmative - Don Lovisa

Arguing The Negative - Neil Gonsalves

Opening Statement by Don Lovisa

Students as Customers: A Call for Rigorous, Relevant, and Responsive Higher Education.

Higher education must evolve — not by compromising its academic mission, but by elevating it through relevance, responsiveness, and a renewed focus on the learner as a customer.

Treating students as customers creates a culture of accountability and responsiveness. Like any service industry, higher education must meet the evolving expectations of students, parents and stakeholders.

I argue that when institutions treat students like customers:

• They improve service delivery, from advising and teaching to facilities and technology.

• Programs become more career-aligned and relevant to market opportunities.

• Feedback helps to tailor education to real-world needs.

• Institutional transparency increases as colleges compete for enrolment.

As colleges and universities face greater competition to attract students, they are more likely to be open and honest about what they offer, how they operate, and what outcomes students can expect. The customer-centric model pushes institutions to prioritize student success — academically, personally, and professionally.

As Peter Drucker (1954) said, "The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." This simple statement summarizes Drucker's philosophy: businesses exist to make money and serve and satisfy their customers' needs. Although colleges are considered not-for-profit organizations, current funding realities dictate they must generate profits to maintain operations, improve campuses and services, and satisfy their customers—students.

In higher education, recognizing students as customers does not cheapen the academic experience — it reinforces the college's responsibility to ensure that learning is rigorous, relevant, and responsive.

Acknowledging that some educators may worry that this approach commodifies learning or undermines academic integrity, treating students as customers should not mean they dictate academic standards or "buy" credentials.

Competition for student enrolment has led to a greater diversification of programs, more choice, more student-centred learning models, and improved student services. (Reference: Springer. (2006). Dynamics of national and global competition in higher education. Higher Education).

As higher education systems adopt market mechanisms, institutions that respond to student needs are more likely to thrive, improving quality through innovation. Most colleges now invest in Learning Management Systems (LMS), flexible course delivery, and career services to attract and retain students. We are witnessing the use of more emerging technologies, from AI-powered chatbots to predictive analytics in student success platforms, transforming how institutions anticipate and meet student needs. This is more evidence of a changing educational landscape.

A Higher Education, Article. Why the "student as customer" approach is the growing focus in higher education, Cassidy, October 20, 2023, provides current evidence of the value of students as customers.The article concludes that while the student-as-customer model remains controversial, it offers a robust framework for institutions to stay relevant, responsive, and effective in a competitive and rapidly changing higher education environment.

This article argues that the evolving role of students as "customers" in higher education reflects a significant shift in how colleges and universities operate and engage with learners. The study found that nearly 60% of students view their education as a product they purchase, emphasizing their demand for value, personalization, and responsiveness.

In summary, institutions that adopt a customer-centric model are better positioned to:

• Meet modern student expectations, especially among learners who expect fast, digital-first service.

• Personalize educational experiences by tailoring programs and support services to individual needs, learning styles, and aspirations.

• Improve service quality through feedback and continuous innovation in curriculum and campus support.

• Promote better collaboration by involving students in institutional decision-making and building a sense of partnership, loyalty, and engagement.

• Enhance recruitment and retention by delivering seamless, efficient, and student-friendly experiences.

Colleges and universities can't continue to practice the same old methods. The world is changing fast, and higher education needs to keep up. Like other industries, colleges are under pressure to evolve, from how they teach to how they support students.

Today's learners want more from their education; they seek flexible, personalized, and relevant experiences that prepare them for the real world. If institutions do not adapt, they risk becoming outdated and disconnected from what students and employers need.

Change is not optional anymore — it is essential for staying useful, competitive, and impactful.

Opening Statement by Neil Gonsalves

David Hume famously asserted that “the corruption of the best gives rise to the worst”, the saying is apropos to the resolution on debate given I begin from the premise that education is a fundamental social good, which often, by not always, produces a net positive value for individuals and society writ large. Education may be defined broadly as any activity that seeks to inform, instruct, or enhance one's knowledge, skill, attitude, and/or abilities in a given domain. Defined narrowly, education may be analyzed within an institutional context as it relates to services provided by academies of higher learning to students pursuing specific learning outcomes. It is the narrow definition of education that I will utilize here to argue against the resolution that treating students like customers improves educational quality.

To remove ambiguity we need a degree of specificity and a contextual field within which to explore this topic, to that end I focus specifically on the Ontario college system and frame my argument around three specific pillars; an imbalance in relational equity between institutions and students; the practice of evaluating education based on its instrumental function; and the impact of turning education from a social good into a commodity.

Changing Focus

Sixty years ago, premier Bill Davis introduced legislation that reshaped post-secondary education in Ontario. He advocated for close-to-home, career-focused, labour-market-aligned education that would supply the local workforce. Davis envisioned that colleges would be deeply rooted in local communities, provide a viable alternative to a university education, and be explicitly vocational in their orientation. Today Ontario is home to twenty-four public colleges, in more than 100 locations, with an annual enrolment of approximately half a million students. Compared to 1965, we live in a vastly different society, operate in a categorically different economy, and contend with social and technological issues that would have been unimaginable at the birth of the Ontario public college system. In adapting to our new realities, the system has strayed far from the original vision, morphed into something wholly different, and responded to market pressures and financial constraints by adopting a customer-centric model for education.

Let me be explicitly clear, I am an advocate for free-market economics and capitalism, I do not believe that a customer-centric model is inherently negative. Strategic flexibility plays a critical role in any organization’s long term financial viability. The college system has adapted to a changing society and economy by necessity - that is not in dispute, the changes can be reasonably justified using a sustainability argument. A seven year tuition freeze, being the lowest education funded province in the country, declining domestic enrolment, inflationary pressures, are all legitimate reasons why adaption was necessary to ensure continuity of the college system. I even concede that treating students like customers may very well make the institutions more financially viable, it may improve internal key performance metrics like student satisfaction, it may enhance the competitive advantage to recruit new customers into an expanding range of educational products from micro-credentials, certificates, diplomas, graduate-diplomas and even baccalaureate degrees, and it almost certainly helps mitigate litigation. However, to concede all these points does not negate my original argument, treating students like customers serves a lot of important purposes, improving educational outcomes and quality is not one of them.

Colleges have dramatically altered their original unique value proposition - providing vocationally relevant education as an alternative to university. They have shifted focus away from local communities in favour of higher dollar value global customers through internationalization. And colleges have managed labour costs by relying on a high volume of precarious part-time labour. Most significantly colleges have shifted from treating students like stakeholders to treating them like shareholders, allowing colleges to focus on improving retention, mitigating attrition, and improving customer satisfaction via higher graduation rates. Benefits however come with a price, and that price is educational quality or as David Hume famously asserted “the corruption of the best gives rise to the worst”

Relational Equity

In 1987, Dmitry Davidoff at the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, invented a social deduction game called Mafia (Werewolf in some versions), it is a dynamic, partial information, group game. The game models a conflict between an informed minority and uninformed majority, thus creating an information asymmetry in an imaginary setting. The game ultimately demonstrates that an informed minority will always have an advantage over an uninformed majority. The concept is relevant to the analysis of relationship between students and institutions and their related impact on educational quality.

Relational equity in an educational context refers to building reciprocal relationships despite power imbalances between students and the institutions they attend. Reciprocity and respect are therefore contingent on clear and honest information sharing that allows for informed decision making on the part of the students. In order to have a fulsome conversation about the quality of education, students must first be clear on the intended outcomes they should reasonably expect upon completion. Too often there is a conflation between credential completion and knowledge acquisition. To make a case for improved quality as a result of a customer-centric approach, one would have to demonstrate that the practice of treating students like customers results in a higher degree of knowledge retention and transfer when applied to their future work prospects.

In spite of the fact that Ontario turns out more graduates with post-secondary education than any country in the OECD many employers report that graduates are are ill-prepared for the jobs they are hired to do. CIBC economist Benjamin Tal in a report prepared with the Human Resources Professional Association (HRPA) reports that fewer than half of HR professionals consider that the employees they have hired were adequately prepared for the jobs they were hired for. “There is a vast gap between what is taught in Ontario colleges and universities and what is needed in an ever-shifting economy.” - It is tempting to attribute the employment struggles of new graduates to the current economic challenges presented by the current US administration’s ongoing trade war but the challenges of underemployment, and skill gaps have existed for years. If a customer-centric model was truly beneficial, colleges would do a better job of ensuring that their customers were matched with the right products while offering some guarantee that the skills being instructed were actually what was being demanded by the workforce.

In all fairness, some of these troubles are exacerbated by the secondary school system that feeds prospective students into local colleges. Data from six large school boards representing one-third of Ontario's student population showed the proportion of students with 90-plus averages rose significantly after the COVID pandemic school closures. The trend towards higher grades would not be a concern if it was truly accompanied by an increase in student proficiency, except studies consistently demonstrate that Canadian students have declining academic performance. Between 2018 and 2022 math and reading literacy levels have dropped 14 points on average, and those drops in proficiency have been a consistent trend for more than a decade. Yet colleges recruit and graduate many of these students while doing little to address literacy rates, is it any wonder that employers complain about the basic skills of college graduates?

Students largely enter the post-secondary system with documentable information deficits and institutions continue to exploit the knowledge gap by promising that the solution to the problem is more credentials. For a customer-centric model to provide better educational quality, institutions would have to address the real issues that that impact students employability beyond credential completion.

Evaluating education based on its instrumental function

Despite low literacy levels of college entrants, Ontario colleges have consistently high graduation rate. The economics of education have changed the dynamics within educational institutions. Post-secondary institutions have adopted a customer-centric approach to students, assigning a high value to perceived student satisfaction and customer retention. Treating students like customers rather than learners has predictably resulted in students acting like customers. This often creates the unfortunate environment within which worrying about customer retention takes priority over the foundational principle of education as a social good. The biggest losers in this dynamic are actually the students themselves. A failure to achieve foundation learning skills and subject mastery will have a lasting impact on their career trajectory, as well as their problem solving and critical thinking abilities, not to mention their social development and capacity for resilience in the future.

Colleges focus on the instrumental function of credential completion as a measure of job qualification. However the abundance of college graduates entering the labour market has predictably resulted in credential inflation that has an adverse impact of labour competitiveness by reinforcing educational stratification. The Pew Research Center estimates that young adults today are significantly better educated than previous generations and yet have less financially stability. Colleges like any other organization highlight the achievements of the few exceptional students, I do not dispute that there are students who succeed and thrive, but policy and practice needs to be generally applicable to the masses not the exceptions.

By focusing on the instrumental reason for obtaining a post-secondary credential rather than the social, emotional and intellectual value the journey offers its participants, post-secondary institutions have shifted away from subject mastery, critical thinking, and civic engagement. Viewed through an instrumental lens, obtaining a credential allows students to apply for jobs that demand specific qualifications. If the mandate of colleges is to build applicants rather than career ready individuals, then they are doing a fine job. Building an applicant is about checking the right boxes; credential - check, participation in some form of work integrated learning - check, volunteer hours - check, awards - check. But check boxes are the not the measure of quality, they are a measure of process.

Turning education from a social good into a commodity

By the time we entered the twenty-first century there was significant scope creep in the original mandate for vocationally focused Ontario colleges. Many of the new programs and courses are neither vocationally driven nor particularly practical as originally envisioned. A fact conveniently buried in a statistic referred to as ‘Unrelated Employment’ - Said differently, the graduate is in a job for which their education was not relevant. To apply a business analogy to this customer outcome, an unrelated education is like selling an electric vehicle to a person living in a town with no charging stations. So much for vocationally focused education that supplied the labour force.

The commodification of education, rampant credential inflation, and a focus on student satisfaction over subject mastery all have a detrimental impact on public perception of value.Education as a social good is increasingly seen as antiquated. Students, as consumers, demand ease-of-use from their products. They clearly signal expectations to receive the certificate they perceived they had already purchased, regardless of their performance. The artificially produced priority for higher grades, and completion of multiple credentials has made students increasingly focused on results rather than learning. Meeting student expectations and avoiding customer complaints has resulted in significant quality related issues in college classrooms, endemic low attendance, increased social disruption, higher levels of anxiety, sub-standard reading, writing, and communication performance.

Fear of revenue shortfalls has informally yet pervasively led to an erosion of academic rigour, compromised in favour of bolstering retention. Utilizing a customer-centric approach to students, combined with an unrelenting obsession with student satisfaction survey results, has arguably resulted in the diminishing marginal utility of a post-secondary education.

Colleges have shifted away from considering education as a social good, for better or worse teaching and learning is a hierarchal relationship. Education provides the opportunity to develop knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes that should be assessed on the basis of retention and transfer. If we fail to properly assess levels of mastery and the capacity to apply that knowledge to real world settings we end up with customers who have purchased a credential, checked the completion box, reported being satisfied and somehow continue to be under-employed, financially unstable and socially immobile.

I would argue that all of those factors demonstrate that treating students like customers does not improve educational quality. The practice is good for running the business of education. It exploits the imbalance in relational equity between institutions and students, it delivers on the instrumental function of credential completion, and it turns education from a social good that has a net positive value on the individual and society into a transactional commodity with a short product life cycle fuelling conspicuous consumption that merely signals status.

About the Authors:

Neil Gonsalves is the author of the book, ‘I’m Not Your Token: Unapologetic Clarity in Divided Times’’, a TEDx speaker, and post-secondary educator for the past twenty years. He is a 2025 Durham Community Champion Medallion Award recipient, recognized by the Member of Parliament for Durham from the Canadian House of Commons for unwavering commitment and dedication to improving the community.

Don Lovisa is President Emeritus, Durham College, retired after a distinguished 16 year tenure as President. With over 36 years experience in the Ontario post-secondary sector, his focus has always been on transformative leadership that nurtured strong community relations built on an open, supportive, and welcoming organizational culture that made space for divergent views.

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