Re: Measurement in Education LO1545

Barry Mallis (barry_mallis@powershare.markem.com)
7 Jun 1995 14:16:34 -0400

Replying to D Justice at Depaul, regarding Measurement in Education LO1523

You ask who the customers are. You indicate that the issue of customer
isn't clear in the university.

But then, at the end of your piece you define it most succinctly:

What seems very clear, however, is that at least a part of every higher
education institution's responsibility is to provide a set of services to
its students from which the student has at least a high likelihood of
learning something personally and socially valuable. This relationship
does require, it seems to me, that unversities take very seriously the
need to serve the students in ways that can improve the services and
better achieve the outcomes they believe they are paying to acquire.

Customers in business also provide services. This is crystal clear in the
traditional sense of the home consumer customer, and also clear in the
manufacturing plant where we are customers downstream in a process, and we
serve those downstraem of us. So how is this any less complicated in the
university, whether the post-doctoral student at Rockefeller University or
the freshman at a Greenfield Community College?

I think you brush off the idea of a student customer too easily. They
often haven't a clue as to what they want. Does that make them any less
the customer for services we continuously try to improve, for the purposes
you state so well in your posting I excerpted above?

My personal, still jaded view of education is that the proof is in the
pudding. Students as a group, on the whole, are customers of the teachers
who interact with them, who move them, who shape them, who open them to
knowledge and conceptual thinking, etc. etc. AND students are the
products of all the processes. Yup, we can get pretty confuses with the
words, but IMHO its the teaching cadre which is responsible for providing
continually improving product and services to fashion the best possible
customer environment for the recipients of such product and services.

--
Barry Mallis                               "We must not wish for the
Total Quality Resource Manager    disappearance of any of our
MARKEM Corporation                troubles, but the grace to
Keene, NH 03431                         transform them."
bmallis@markem.com