Meltem ARAT

TO WHAT EXTENT THE STUDENT IS A CUSTOMER

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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