Are most colleges businesses and not just the obviously
for-profit ones either? All colleges sell their services (marketing and recruitment),have sales
Maybe they are businesses; unique businesses but businesses
just the same. Businesses like a medical practice perhaps with professionals
serving the needs of their patients. Each tries to use professional services providers
(doctors/professors) to better the lives of their clients. Each purports to
higher missions than making money. Each make
patients/customers/ students pay for services but each is also paid for some of
the services by outside groups like insurance and the government for medical
practices and local, state and federal government for colleges. Each depends on
a core of contracted professionals; doctors for the medical practice and
faculty for colleges.
But there are also differences. Whereas medical practices
are dedicated to doing all they can to save their customers, colleges seem to
be rather indifferent to their customers’ success and longevity. Medical
practices try to keep their customers alive and coming to the practice while
colleges seem to thrive on having huge swathes of their clientele die off or leave.
If a medical practice had a reputation of losing a third of its patients every year,
it would be seen as questionably competent; a group to stay away from. Many colleges
lose fifty percent of their students with some losing as many as 80% of a class
and they are still enrolling future students. A medical practice with such a
bad record would get cut off from government funds and close while colleges
with terrible retention records often get grants to try and keep them going and
failing.
Colleges have a rather strange relationship with their customers.
And while we are at it, they are customers. Students exchange money for goods
and services and that makes them customers by definition. Call them students
if that makes it easier to swallow, call them the college’s clients if that
makes one feel better but they are customers.
Colleges spend an inordinate amount of time and money to
attract their customers to get them to
buy the college’s offerings, but then do so very little to retain them. They spend
around $5460 to obtain every new customer and process him or her into the
system but then neglect to capitalize on that investment by ignoring their needs
and expectations. As a result, large percentages of their customer base leave
the college each semester.
They exert a great deal of energy trying to get potential
students to believe that the college cares about them but as soon as the
student signs the application check and deposit, they just toss them into the
deep end of the college and do all they can to make them sink. They treat all
students with the same services as if they all were the same and too often we have
found those services are lacking in quality and assistance. In fact, if one
looks at how much money a college actually spends in student services needed to
retain their customers, it would be shockingly low f there is any money set
aside for retention services at all..
What should be the primary activity of college –educating
its students – treats all students as if they were the same learner. The
lecture approach for example just sends out information as if all the students learn
the same way. Everyone is given the same information and work whether or not
his personal needs and learning protocols are receptive to them. This is certainly different than medicine in
which every treatment is personalized to the particular patient. College hands
out information as if every patient needed the same medicine whether or not the
need exists for that medicine. If a doctor gave out the same prescription to
all he or she would be seen as incompetent. Colleges are seen as efficient when
the same lecture is given to a class of 500 in an introductory course independent
of whether learning actually takes place.
But doctors work with fewer patients than does a professor lecturing
to a class of one or two hundred even as few as 50. Doctors who work a
clinic may easily see that many patients in a week and they all get some personal
attention. The average professor has three classes of 20 or 60 students total so
what is the excuse of not giving each student personal attention to make sure
they all succeed?
When a patient needs extra care, he is often sent to see a professional
specialist. In college that might happen in writing when a student is sent to a
writing lab but in other areas the student with extra need is often handed off
to a peer tutor. And we wonder why students
with extra need fail so then. It is as if we have a patient with a serious
problem being sent to a med student for specialized help. Why is that? Because
the professor is considered too busy to deal with tutoring in most schools. And
the more senior the professor and more renowned in her knowledge the less time
she has for the primary purpose of college, making sure students succeed and
graduate in many too many cases.
When one boils it down, a major difference between a medical
practice and a college is that in the practice each patient is individually important
whereas in a college, a student is not. To “lose a patent” in a medical practice
is considered a terrible thing. In college losing a student can just be sign
that the college is academically rigorous. In the medical practice, when a
patient is lost that often calls for a review of why that patient is gone. In
most colleges if a student leaves, no one looks into why he or she left. It
just is not that important. “We’ll go and recruit another”. A life may be damaged
when a student leaves or flunks out but that is not of much concern to the
college. A student life is just not that important.
In a medical practice, the administrators worry about patients
who will sue for one reason or other. In college, administrators worry about
faculty members complaining about one thing or another. As a result, medical
practices do all they can to treat the patient’s ills and personal needs while
colleges treat the needs and self-perceived injuries of the faculty more than
the students.
Colleges need to become more like medical practices,
businesses that focus on the needs of their patients, the customers first and
foremost. They need to rethink their priorities and put students first and the
services they need to each succeed focus upon what each student needs to
succeed. Colleges need to put the student first and provide all the services
they need to succeed.
IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU
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