Students as Consumers

On the WPA-L list recently there was a discussion of a situation that arose at one of the list members' institutions where an adjunct writing instructor had simply disappeared shortly before the end of the semester, leaving no paper trail (grades, notes, or actual graded papers) that would enable the WPA to construct realistic grades for the students. A wide-ranging discussion ensued not only concerning what should be done with the students--make them take the class again (higher administrators' approach on that campus)? make them write another paper and base their final grade on how well they do on it? give them all Bs, or even As?--but also on expectations, realistic and otherwise, that students bring to a college education, and how we should feel about and react to those expectations.

Keith Rhodes, WPA at Grand Valley State University, protested the idea of giving everybody a B or an A: "I'm not getting the idea that a grade should come from paying money and doing time." Brian Donohue-Lynch, professor of anthropology and sociology at Quinebaug Valley Community College, agreed, in theory, but noted that in practice "unfortunately this is a big part of the problem here. We deal, ultimately, in opaque 'grades' rather than in any evidence of actual student learning; ultimately, students get these grades once they have spent so many hours in class/homework. And this is institutionalized in our institutional records system at the core of our programs--we give grades on transcripts, in relation to how many hours (credit hours, Carnegie Units) students spend in class."

Keith replied:

I'm reminded of a a quip I used to use to some effect with TQM-in-education advocates: we have to remember that college education is one of the few products people buy and then hope they don't get. The "customers" supposedly bought access to abilities. Being clever wizards and giving them certificates instead of the real thing only makes sense if they are going to stay in Oz. Eventually, they'll figure that out.

To repeat myself for clarity, they bought an education, not a grade. The fact that they have to participate to get what they actually bought is an inescapable part of the deal. Giving away free grades to cover for a failure to deliver the actual product would not be analogous to anything we would call good business practice as to any normal product.

Students aren't tidily customers. It's an incomplete metaphor that we're all better off complicating.

Right, but surely the punchline in "college education is one of the few products people buy and then hope they don't get" depends on our assumptions about the exact nature of that educational "product." If the product is critical thinking, say--our own idealistic notion--then yes, students by and large resist "getting" the product we think we're selling them. If the product is a degree, however--made up of a major and a minor, made up of credit hours with grades attached to them, as our students tend to think--then they are going to be extremely angry if they pay their money and put in their time and effort and don't get the product they paid for.

I wonder too about Keith's notion that "being clever wizards and giving them certificates instead of the real thing only makes sense if they are going to stay in Oz." I'm guessing he's alluding to the scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz where the "professor" gives the Tinman a heart-shaped clock, the Lion a badge of courage, and the Scarecrow a diploma--instead of "the real thing," namely, an actual heart, actual courage, or an actual brain. But that scene seems to me a little more complicated than he's suggesting. The binary "certificates instead of the real thing" implies that there is nothing real about the feeling Dorothy's three friends have that they've gained something of what they need. It implies that snake oil is snake oil and can't have even the slightest placebo effect. Does a student with a college diploma and the feeling that s/he's learned something really take nothing "real" away from an institution of higher learning?

Or, to put that in terms of The Wizard of Oz, doesn't the feeling the three friends have that they've gained something valuable at the end come from the fact that they have gained in heart, courage, and brains along the way, and the symbolic "certificates" that the professor gives them only yields them an outward sign of what they've already gained, and thereby some "professional" self-esteem?

And our students: isn't the difference between a "dumb"/"ignorant" student and a "bright"/"learned" student often largely a matter of self-esteem, so that the former keeps undermining his own learning by convincing herself that it's not happening, and the latter keeps learning no matter what's going on in class because she's convinced that it is happening?

Or, more cynically: isn't one of the most important lessons our students learn at college how to take orders, follow instructions, cope with boredom, sit quietly for hours every day doing mindless make-work and pretending to learn? Isn't this in fact their most important skill for cubicle work?

In other words, I guess, I'm suggesting that the "certificate instead of the real thing" binary Keith Rhodes offers excludes worlds of really important learning in the middle.

Paul Turpin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Senior Fellow at The Jacoby Center for Public Service & Civic Leadership (University of the Pacific), added an important rethinking of the student-as-consumer metaphor:

The student as consumer metaphor, I believe, is a bad one, not because it is an economic metaphor but because it is the wrong economic metaphor. While we do in fact have monetary and contractual relations with students, they are not *consumers* of learning; they are *investors*. Moreover, they are a particular type of investor -- partners -- which requires them to participate in the activities and responsibilities of education in their own persons. The fiduciary (faithfulness) obligations in the fiscal and contractual relationship between faculty and students go both directions, as befits a partnership, even though students are limited partners in relation to faculty.

In simple terms, students do not buy a commodity, product, or even a service in their classes (though they do in the bookstore, cafeteria, and residence hall). What tuition pays for is the right to undertake a course of study with someone who both teaches and certifies their command of the knowledge, practices, or skills in a class, a disciplinary major, and so on. The most student-friendly version of this explanation I've heard is "College is like a health club. You pay your fees and can use it or not, as you please; we keep the money in either case." Even this analogy has its limits (because health clubs provide services like access to equipment and training but do not evaluate their customers), but students can understand the idea that the user has to do the workout to get the benefits.

The certification that gets expressed in grades, transcripts, and degrees are forms of testimony of our judgments of students' their relative level of achievement, or to use another economic metaphor, judgments of their development of educational capital.

The choice of metaphor matters because the consumption metaphor leads toward a logic of what consumers can and should expect in a market, particularly with respect to the quality & price of the commodities available to them. Students come in feeling like they should be able to shop for courses and that they should pass because they show up, because it's "paid for"; parents paying tuition feel like they should be treated like customers -- as in "the customer is always right", "give the customer what she wants", and similar commercial sentiments that lead in the direction that "paying for a degree" comes to be taken literally.

What counts as accountability to a consumer differs from that to an investor, above all in the developmental expectations in each case. Consumption is nearly always immediate; investment develops more slowly, not just across a semester, but across a major and a course of college study. Remaining caught up in the consumer metaphor increases our difficulties in making the case for broader and more holistic forms of assessing educational development. Clarifying what can be talked about in consumer terms and what should be talked about in investment terms -- and especially partnership -- is crucial to resisting the tendency to frame education as a simple consumer market.

Paul's metaphor is helpful in other ways as well. It helps us ask the difficult questions about higher education today. For example, if I'm paying for a gym membership so I can get into shape, and I don't go, but keep paying my membership fee, that's my prerogative (and also my loss). If on the other hand I go three times a week, and enjoy it, and benefit from it, but they keep jacking up the membership fees to pay for services not strictly related to fitness (at least my fitness), like sinking millions of dollars into sponsoring sports teams and building luxury dormitories, I may gradually become disaffected, and decide that I'm better off buying my own elliptical trainer and some free weights, or watching a fitness program on TV and doing exercises in my living room.

In order to lure students-as-customers to become their consumers, to buy their products--however we define those products, the main thing in this model is tuition dollars--institutions of higher learning have been expanding their expenditures on bells and whistles that are perceived as attractive to "students" but may only be attractive to a certain fairly small segment of the possible entering freshman class, and that have the effect of making a college education much more expensive, so expensive that fewer and fewer families can afford it. There are equations of intangibles like prestige into which winning seasons and bowl games in football figure that are too complex for the mind of an English professor to work out, but people around here are predicting that our victory in the Cotton Bowl this year will translate into increased donations and enrollments--and yet I can't help but feel that these equations are ultimately unsustainable. How important is it, really, for our universities and colleges to fund farm teams for the NFL and the NBA? A winning football season like we had this past fall more than repays Houston Nutt's $1.9 million annual salary; but successive losing seasons did not repay Ed Orgeron's $1.3 million annual salary, and not everybody in the country can have a winning season.

Meanwhile, the legislatures and general public love our football games and despise the research we do, and blame high tuition on faculty research, which in fact brings in more money in indirect costs than many football programs do, and the call goes out to put universities on starvation diets and force us lazy professors to teach four or five courses a semester (because what other possible value can the student-as-consumer expect for his or her money?).

Something's got to change. And it's almost certainly already changing, all around us, as our current situation becomes more and more untenable, and alternatives like the University of Phoenix spring up like weeds. But that's a subject for another post.