ABSTRACT
The consumer metaphor in Higher Education (HE) rose to prominence following Deming’s notion of Total Quality Management (TQM) in the early 1990s (Chaffee and Lawrence 1992). Under TQM, quality is defined in terms of conformance to the requirements of the customer (Kumar 2003). The student thus becomes the central focus for its determination. The metaphor experienced a further surge in significance following the emergence of marketisation in HE, an idea based on the notion of free trade in goods and services between countries encouraged and legislated for by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) (Bassett 2006). In this ‘freemarket’ environment (Ayal and Karras 1998), HE became a tradable service, based on demand and supply laws under which students became key consumers while universities and their staff were the providers. Consumerism is the central tenet of the free market in which business success depends almost entirely on satisfying customer needs and exceeding their expectations. Most recently, the notion of student as consumer has been highlighted following the move by many world governments to redirect the responsibility for funding HE in universities from central governments to individual students. This has been in response to the World Bank which has the view that the private benefits of a Higher Education experience are higher than its public benefits (Psacharopoulos 1994). Because students are now paying for their HE experience, directly or indirectly through ‘learn now, pay later’ loan schemes (AimHigher 2006), the notion of student as consumer has been brought into sharp focus.
