Customers
Jonathan McQuarrie,
Higher Education Strategy Associates,
May 18, 2021
This is a retelling of the 'students as customers' argument, with the added coda near the end: "No you're not. You're the product." And it brings me to mind the discussion of social media services where, also, you're not the customer, you are the product. And to take this line of thinking well beyond Jonathan McQuarrie's original intent, when we ask, "who is the customer", we get different answers from different institutions. In some cases the customer is the state. In others, it's business, or as styled recently in an HBR column, employers. And - arguably - for elite institutions, the customer is the institution itself. The existence of students at Harvard, for example, is intended primarily to benefit Harvard itself. I'm just thinking out loud here, and there may be nothing to this, but it's useful to run through thought exercises like this.
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