Customer satisfaction surveys are seductive, but learning is often uncomfortable: it asks for contradiction, delay, and disciplined doubt. Treating students as customers cancels the educator’s duty to disappoint strategically—grading, standards, and honest feedback. I show how universities can maintain hospitality without sacrificing rigor and propose governance rules that protect unsatisfying truths from being outvoted.
If the classroom were a shop, we would issue receipts for confusion and offer refunds for delayed insight. Fortunately, it is not a shop. The thing universities sell—if we must continue this inelegant metaphor—is not a feeling but a capability. And capabilities do not arrive as delight. They arrive as the residue of repeated, structured disappointment: the proof that your earlier self was wrong and that you survived the correction.
The Customer Paradox
The customer metaphor is seductive because it promises clarity. Customers have preferences; institutions have services; we optimize the match and rate the smile. But when we import this logic wholesale, we ask the wrong system to make the decision. The market’s code is pay/not pay; the university’s is qualify/not qualify. One seeks to remove friction; the other, when it is honest, allocates it.
Learning is temporally misaligned with satisfaction. It requires contradiction (“Your model is elegant and wrong”), delay (“We will revisit this in two weeks”), and disciplined doubt (“Demonstrate why your data does not say what you want it to say”). Students often dislike these moments, and rightly so: they are uncomfortable. But discomfort, when designed and justified, is not a failure of service; it is the service.
Treating students as customers cancels the educator’s duty to disappoint strategically. This duty animates grading, standards, and honest feedback. Replace it with the mantra “the customer is always right,” and you produce predictable substitutions: grade inflation dressed up as compassion; simplified assignments paraded as inclusivity. The result is popular and brittle.
Consider the domains where this is pedagogy, not sadism. In statistics, intuition is a frequent liar, and students must learn to distrust pleasing patterns. In languages, fluency is built on repetition that feels insulting to one’s adult identity; no one gives five stars to the subjunctive mood. In clinical training or a design critique, the honest correction saves time later, when the bridge would otherwise wobble or the patient would not.
Hospitality vs. Judgment
This is not a plea for indifference to student experience. Hospitality is a virtue in education. It takes the form of clarity, predictability, respect, and support. It does not mean making the path flat; it means making the path visible and the handrails sturdy. The art is to separate hospitality from judgment in both practice and governance.
The governance problem is simple to name: we substitute what we can count (satisfaction) for what we care about (learning) and then, with time, care about what we can count. The system persuades itself that it is modernizing when it is in fact abdicating.
There is a way out that does not rely on nostalgia or heroism. It relies on design. Below are governance rules that protect unsatisfying truths from being outvoted while preserving the hospitality students deserve.
- Split the ledger: hospitality vs. learning. Track both, but never let the former stand in for the latter. Hospitality includes syllabus clarity and feedback timeliness. Learning indicators include external assessments, performance in subsequent courses, and oral defenses. Make it policy: hospitality metrics cannot be used as proxies for learning in promotion.
- Delay the verdict. Most satisfaction is a verdict on the present; most learning is a judgment about the future. Collect course evaluations, but weight them only after a cooling-off period—one semester or one year—when students can see the utility of what irritated them.
- Protect standards with external anchors. Use external examiners or cross-departmental panels for capstones. Publish grade distributions by course level and require narrative justifications when distributions compress toward the top.
- Create a right to difficulty and a duty to explain it. Every syllabus should include a difficulty map: where the effort will concentrate, what support will accompany it, and how success will be judged. This transforms difficulty from a surprise into a contract.
- Reform course evaluations to reduce bias. Retire questions that reliably measure stereotypes (e.g., “overall enthusiasm”) and foreground those tied to clarity. Forbid the use of raw scores in isolation. Evaluations should trigger conversations, not verdicts.
- Decouple revenue pressure from grading decisions. Create a central “rigor insurance” fund that protects departments when honest grading reduces short-term enrollment. Signal, with budget, that “No, not yet” is not an act of institutional self-harm.
- Reward capability gains, not charm. In promotion, include evidence of downstream learning: student performance in subsequent courses, success on standardized external tasks, or supervisor attestations from internships.
- Establish an Assessment Review Panel. When grades are appealed, the question should be, “Was the standard clear and fairly applied?” not “Is the student happy?” This keeps standards from arbitrary enforcement and prevents grade bargaining.
- Use time as pedagogy. Design courses that stage discomfort and recovery. Midterm assessments should be formative and substantive, with mandated opportunities for revision, normalizing error and making correction routine.
- Practice index hygiene. Declare publicly which numbers your institution refuses to optimize, including raw satisfaction scores, and which it will prioritize instead. A principle that never costs you anything is a slogan.
We will lose students, some will object. Perhaps. But what recruits sustainably is reputation for capability, not reputation for comfort. Ask employers which graduate they prefer: the one who enjoyed every week, or the one who can do the work. This also isn’t about disadvantaging marginalized students; it’s the opposite. When difficulty is chaotic or unsupported, it does harm. But when it is designed, transparent, and scaffolded, it is fair. The worst inequity is to export low standards from wealthy classrooms, harming those with the least room to maneuver.
In education, communication is governed by double contingency: I act in view of your possible actions; you act in view of mine. Trust reduces this complexity. Customer logic tries to replace trust with guarantees. But guarantees in a domain of uncertainty are either lies or training wheels. The risk of telling a student “No” is the price the system pays to mean anything at all.
A Warranty for Capability
Picture, if you can bear it, a surgeon trained under a strict satisfaction regime. The incisions are neat, the playlists agreeable, the conversation charming. The survival rate is, unfortunately, disappointing. Or consider a parachute packer whose customers enjoyed the speed of service. Sometimes the gravity of our examples must be literal to shake us out of metaphor.
A university that refuses to be a shop does not become a monastery. It becomes a workshop: clear hours, visible tools, apprentices who are treated with respect and denied easy praise. The heat is real; the burns are minor and intentional. The master does not smile constantly; the master explains constantly. The apprentice learns that discomfort is not a signal to flee but a signal to focus.
In the end, we might replace one slogan with another. Not “the customer is always right,” but “the student is always seen.” Seen as someone who can do hard things with help. Hospitality without rigor is condescension; rigor without hospitality is cruelty.
Degrees should function less like souvenirs of a pleasant stay and more like warranties for capability. A warranty is not the memory of a smile. It is the promise that, when tested, something will hold. For that, educators must keep the strange, dignified duty to disappoint—and universities must give them cover while they do it.
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#re_v5 (Article 2 of 10 on global higher education issues: Student Satisfaction)