TO WHAT EXTENT THE STUDENT IS A CUSTOMER

Year 2011, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 293 - 306, 01.06.2011

Meltem Arat

Abstract

Depending on the widespread usage of the total quality management at
institutions, customer focus has begun to be used in many fields of private and
public sectors. Public services, municipality services, hospitals and universities
are also started to use customer focused management. Anyhow it is both open for
discussion whether is it suitable to accept the patients as the customers at hospitals
or is it suitable to accept the students as the customers at universities.
In spite of the complementary services like university building facilities, canteen
services and computing services can be structured as customer focused, setting up
a customer/student focused curriculum and examination system is still open for
questioning and discussion.
In this research, the possible approaches to assess students as customers and the
possible approaches to assess students as “just students” will be presented.

Keywords

Higher education, student-as-customer, student-as-partner

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