Students as customers in higher education: reframing the debate
Abstract
Even though marketing in higher education (HE) is well established, there is a continued debate about who the customer is, with many still not accepting that students should be viewed as customers in HE. The student as customer model has its opponents and proponents. This paper reframes the debate using the framework of market orientation, customer orientation, and service (including co-creation) and relationship marketing. Using newer conceptualizations of the role of customers, the paper recommends exploring how to respond to students as customers instead of continuing to deny that students are customers.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In Canada, neoliberal reforms have positioned higher education as a competitive marketplace where universities brand themselves as providers of rigorous academic experience and students as consumers.
“In Canada, neoliberal reforms have positioned higher education as a competitive marketplace where universities brand themselves as providers of rigorous academic experience and students as consumers [19, 48].”
From Infrastructuring as Collective Resistance: How Disabled Students Negotiate Access Through Technology in Universities (2026) · cites this paper as [19]
Cites
Revisiting Consumption Experience: A More Humble but Complete View of the Concept
Carù, A., & Cova, B. (2003) · Marketing Theory · doi:10.1177/14705931030032004 · Cited by 851 · see citing works
The Effects of Student-Faculty Interaction In the 1990s
Kuh, G. D., & Hu, S. (2001) · The Review of Higher Education · doi:10.1353/rhe.2001.0005 · Cited by 774 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: AI in the higher education
Popkhadze, N. (2021) · Hallinnon Tutkimus · doi:10.37450/ht.107896 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Accessibility Work in Academia: Balancing Needs, Bridging Gaps, and Breaking Down Barriers
Ly, C. K., Cross, T., Petterson, A., Pandey, I., & Chandra, P. (2025) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3757454 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
“These activities are shaped by the customer service standards in the AODA and the broader neoliberal treatment of students as the customers of education [36, 79].”
InfluentialKim Ly, C., Cross, T., Tasman, S., Mattka, J., Doggett, O., Marathe, M., & Chandra, P. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791638
“In Canada, neoliberal reforms have positioned higher education as a competitive marketplace where universities brand themselves as providers of rigorous academic experience and students as consumers [19, 48].”
- Authors
- Guilbault, M.
- Affiliations
- New Jersey Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Guilbault, Melodi
- Venue
- Journal of Marketing for Higher Education
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2016-07-02
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 132-142
- ISSN
- 0884-1241 (ISSN-L)
- 1540-7144
- OpenAlex
- W2533182429
- Cited by
- 198
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 29 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 6
- FWCI
- 17.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Marketing for HIGHER EDUCATION (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Customer Service Quality and Loyalty
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Higher Education Governance and Development
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Marketing and Advertising Strategies
- Keywords
- students as customers, higher education marketing, customer orientation, market orientation, service co-creation, relationship marketing, student experience
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
