I asked Lynn Perry Wooten, the president of Simmons University, a question that makes higher education visibly uncomfortable: “It seems like students are your customers — hence the focus on customer experience. How do you think about that?”
Watch what the question does. In a business, “the customer” is an organizing principle: the person whose experience you exist to serve, whose departure you fear, whose feedback you instrument. In a university, the same word sounds like a surrender — as if admitting students are customers means the degree becomes a product, the professor a vendor, and education a transaction with a diploma at the end.
Both reactions miss the point. The question isn’t whether students are customers. It’s what breaks when an institution refuses to decide.
Look at it through the SPICE lenses — Strategy, Politics, Innovation, Culture, Execution:
Strategy. A university that won’t name who it serves ends up serving everyone’s second priority: rankings for the board, research prestige for the faculty, amenities for the brochure. Wooten’s answer points at the strategic alternative — the student’s transformational experience as the product. That’s a harder promise than satisfaction. A customer-experience strategy for a university isn’t “give them what they want.” It’s “design, deliberately, the experience that changes who they are — and measure whether it happened.”
Politics. The customer word is a turf war in disguise. If students are customers, students get a vote — on schedules, on modality, on what a degree should contain — and every one of those votes dilutes someone else’s authority: the faculty’s over curriculum, the administration’s over tradition, the alumni’s over what the place is supposed to remain. Institutions don’t reject the customer frame because it’s inaccurate. They reject it because it’s a redistribution of power wearing a vocabulary question as a costume.
Innovation. The genuinely innovative move isn’t a chatbot for admissions. It’s importing the discipline of customer-experience design — journey mapping, friction audits, feedback loops with closing dates — into an institution that has historically run on anecdote and prestige. Where does a first-generation student actually get lost: the application, the aid letter, the first semester, the advising gap? Businesses instrument those moments because churn taught them to. Universities mostly discover them at the exit interview that never happens.
Culture. Here’s the cultural trap: in higher education, caring too visibly about the student’s experience can read as caring less about standards — as if rigor and service were opposite poles. So faculty distance themselves from the “customer” language to protect their identity as scholars, and the student’s experience becomes nobody’s identity and therefore nobody’s job. The institutions that escape this trap separate the two cleanly: the standard is non-negotiable; the experience of meeting it is a design problem, and designing it well is a form of respect, not surrender.
Execution. So here’s the machinery: pick three moments that decide whether a student stays — the aid letter, the first failed exam, the advising meeting that never gets scheduled — and assign each one a named owner, a measured outcome, and a feedback loop that closes with the student, not about the student. Publish internally, every term, where students actually fell out of the journey and what changed because of it. You don’t need to call them customers to do any of this. You just need to admit that their experience is designed — by you or by accident.
Today, universities debate the word while their students quietly judge the experience — and transfer, drop out, or never apply. Tomorrow’s winners will have stopped arguing about vocabulary and started owning the journey.
Ask yourself: if your students reviewed your institution the way they review everything else in their lives — publicly, specifically, and forever — what would the rating say about the moments you never designed?
Sources
CXOTalk, “Simmons University President: Higher Education in 2022” — my question to President Lynn Perry Wooten on students as customers and customer experience: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/simmons-university-president-future-higher-education
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