Exploring a Customer Orientation: Free-Market Logic and College Students

This article provides a synthesis of literature on the conceptualization of students as customers and connects the rise of this understanding of students to the expansion of free-market logic into higher education. It details the ways in which the customer orientation appears to be incongruent with the educational lives of college students, and explores the impacts of a customer orientation on students’ educational behaviors and decisions. The conclusion calls for reliable research on the extent to which students actually express a customer orientation and for efforts to resist this orientation and its inherently negative implications.