students as "customers"

[openwaterswimming]

A colleague said to me that we need to "ensure good customer service, the customers being our students".
I guess on a base level she's right (they have paid to do this course and I deliver a service which is to teach them the topic) but something about it made my stomach churn. It's not the first time someone has spoken in this language and I'm wondering -
am I terribly out of date here? I'm new to academia/lecturing so maybe I'm naïve as I thought it was a different kind of relationship...I'm not even sure what kind. When I was a student I didn't think of myself as having purchased a service, maybe I should have done....
Is this progress or some weird cooption of business language into education? I'd love to hear your opinions.

@MrsHuntGeneNotJeremyObviously

Hopefully enough students will want the proper university experience that permanent online won't happen. In the long term universities would be destroying themselves if they did this. No student is going to spend ££££ on accommodation and move across the country, to do what they could have done for less money at home! I'm surprised that the university owns your lectures and could use them in future years without your consent, if you were no longer employed by them. That's not in the spirit of your employment contract surely and I hope you would he able to challenge it.

I’m pretty sure they own my teaching materials, yes. I have never heard of any academic being able to prevent the university from using teaching materials after they have left. It probably even says so in my employment contract.

After all, in the REF, universities are submitted the written research of staff that they have made redundant.

Grade inflation is a definite issue. I used to teach at a university where on my course over 70% of students got a first class degree. Total joke.

DDs course has a rather unique position of stubbornly resisting grade inflation. They won't award more than 30%firsts and 50% 2:1s . The vast majority of the cohort do it as a 4 year integrated masters, the distinctions and merits are similarly distributed, but the 'first/ second' designation is from the first 3 years.
This has led to a rather odd outcome for the current 4th years. The uni obviously wanted to operate 'no detriment' but the course didn't want that to (inevitably) lead to grade inflation. There was no way to square this circle, so they've simply not awarded a grade for the 3rd year, they're just issuing the transcripts - a numbered grade for the first 2 years but then just exam percentages for year 3. (The exams were of course online).

Hopefully employers now and in the future will realise that this cohort - and even moreso some of the following years who've had their school education and exams messed up by covid to wildly different extents - may need looking at more individually than in the past.

That’s interesting @ErrolTheDragon and I hope employers do that take into consideration during recruitment but my dear is that in a few years’ time they won’t necessarily remember the ins and outs of what happened during the Covid crisis.

Although, awarding 30% firsts isn’t too much of a resistance against grade inflation... In 2005, 11% of all graduating students got a first and 43% a 2.1. So from 54% getting a 2.1 or above to 80% is quite a jump. The stats clearly show that this coincided with the rise in tuition fees. Now it could be that young people today are brighter than what they were in 2005 or that they work harder or that the teaching is better. However, being more cynical through having worked in this sector for a while, I think something else is going on.

If anything, class sizes are increasing and a large proportion of all teaching is done by graduate teaching assistants rather than more senior academic staff. When I was an undergrad, there were maybe 3 or 4 phd students in our department and only one of them taught on any of my modules. Now, from a Google search, the same department has over 30 and a large percentage of the seminars and tutorials will be delivered by them. I am not trying to diss GTAs - many of them are great and some of them better teachers than more senior staff. But at the end of the day, they are often recently out of undergraduate study themselves and are often asked to teach subjects that don’t correspond to their research area. Some programmes also recruit huge numbers per cohort and have to resort to ‘overspill lecture theatres’ where the lecture is broadcast via a screen. It’s surprising that this has all led to a surge in grades.

30% firsts isn’t too much of a resistance against grade inflation... In 2005, 11% of all graduating students got a first and 43% a 2.1

I'd guess that back in the day this course would have been awarding more than average numbers of higher grades though, as it's one of the most competitive/highest entry tariff.