AUDIO | Focusing on Customer Service: Higher Education and the “Degree Mill” Debate
Customer
service is not detrimental to higher education’s future; in fact, it’s
critical to the success of students during their period of enrollment
and through their career.
The following interview is with Becky Takeda-Tinker, president of Colorado State University (CSU) Global Campus. Non-traditional students behave more like consumers than the average student, and those focused on professional outcomes are typically more demanding of their institutions than those working toward a degree for their personal development. This requires institutions to provide a high level of customer service, which itself is a hot-button topic of debate in the postsecondary industry. In this interview, Takeda-Tinker discusses the “customer service versus diploma mill” debate and shares her thoughts on the importance of treating students as customers.
1. Why is the customer service mentality important for today’s higher education leaders?
We see customer service as key … for student engagement, retention
and completion leading to graduation. Regarding engagement, we see today
that higher education enrolment is down across the nation. We know from
the Gallup poll from the summer of 2013 that 50 percent of Americans
did not believe college was worth the investment [according to
USAToday]. …
With the slower [enrollment] growth and increased
skepticism regarding the value of higher education, we really believe
institutions need to do more to attract and retain students. On the flip
side, we’re seeing an increase in non-degree education and, so, we also
see that with increased customer service, you can meet the needs of
potential customers that can provide institutions with new students they
may not otherwise be able to attain.
In the area of retention, we know that 75 percent of students today
are non-traditional, meaning they don’t live on campus, attend school
full time or have school as their primary activity. They have all these
distractions … and they need help to maintain a focus and to stay on
track with their degree completion and their course work. … Institutions
need to do whatever they can to keep their students engaged and
marching toward graduation. We know, from our students at CSU Global,
that they continue to face all these external life issues that cause
them to want to leave us so they can do whatever they need to do, so we
have to provide support that allows them to navigate the process and
requirements of school, provide them with the flexibility to take brief
periods of time off from school with the ability to jump back in every
month, and … provide things like tuition guarantees in our policy to
help them financially prepare in advance of enrollment and to stay in
school. …
We believe our students are our customers who are paying good money,
who are going into debt, to attend our campus and it’s our job to ensure
they’re not only receiving a rigorous education that will help them get
a job in the future, but that they’re also able to understand and
navigate the requirements of CSU Global. …
We call that attention and understanding, and I guess other places and organizations call it customer service.
2. What does “customer service” actually mean in the postsecondary context?
Customer service in higher education, from our perspective, is the
provision of support to help our students stay focused and on track with
their educational goals by understanding their needs and working to
meet them at least halfway or more. That service can include human
resource time to make a personal connection with students, to understand
their challenges, their goals and what their financial and academic
abilities are. … We have built our infrastructure to address their needs
and provide service, which is now being considered customer service.
We also have ongoing communication and a consistent point of contact
for the duration of a student’s academic program with us so they always
know where they can call. … We have flexibility in scheduling — 12 terms
a year so that if a student needs to take off some time, they can go do
that and they can pop back in because we have a start date that’s every
month and our terms are eight weeks. … We offer every class every term
so students [can keep working toward their degree].
We also have 24/7 tech support and there’s live tutoring and live
library access, and we will work to return student contact within 24
hours and 72 hours for grading. The students receive this continual
feedback and they know what to expect … and therefore what they have to
deliver.
3. How do you respond to critics of postsecondary customer
service who say institutions that go this route run the risk of becoming
“degree mills”?
We hear that from traditional universities, primarily. It’s really
interesting because an institution that seeks to help its students with
services beyond academic learning is doing just that; helping the
students with services that go beyond academic learning. So it’s just a
more holistic perspective on what it takes to get students to
graduation. Non-traditional students have all these distractions and if
they don’t have this level of help and support that they really need,
they will not stay in school and they will not graduate. It’s doing
nobody any good to get them in and have them fall out.
If we were to be critical of an institution that acts like a factory
or a diploma mill, you have to look at very traditional universities who
have not changed their model of educating students since World War II.
There was an efficiency we learned during that war in executing the
model, the factory process, for adults. … They came out of high school,
took the required classes, submitted to [the] established processes and
came out with a degree. I was one of those students and, while it worked
for me, the nation and the world have dynamically changed since then.
Individualism and customization has really become the norm more than the
exception, and with that comes all the support you have to have around
different needs and unique requests. …
The ability to address that change isn’t a negative; it’s really a
matter of survival for institutions and a matter of success for the
students.
4. What impact does robust customer service have on students?
At CSU Global, we know we’re able to attract graduate students at a
rate that exceeds the national statistics, particularly for public
institutions and even more so for non-traditional learners. Ninety-six
percent of our alumni reported that they’re working for pay, 38 percent
have received a promotion since graduation and 23 percent have been able
to change careers. From that data, I would say that robust customer
service, as defined by CSU Global, is providing a pathway for
non-traditional learners to effectively complete their degrees and to
succeed in a global society. They’re competing and they’re achieving and
they’re doing very well. While we provide all sorts of support services
and while we are always very [much] attuned to their needs, they’re
succeeding. They’re not only graduating, they’re able to get and keep
those jobs and then they’re able to get promoted and switch careers
based on what they’ve learned from their education with us.
5. Is there anything you’d like to add about robust customer
service and the debate between strong customer service as a positive and
strong customer service as a pathway to becoming a degree mill?
With technology, everything is really changing; the paradigm is
shifting. In order to be able to be successful — both for the student
and for the institution — consideration of what customer service looks
like for certain student populations is really an important part of what
customers and students expect. If an institution doesn’t understand and
cannot relate directly to the types of students they have, it will be
very difficult for them to be able to succeed in an economy that will be
driven more by the customer than by the government.
- – - -
Key Takeaways
- Customer expectations are shifting and students now demand a greater level of service from their institutions.
- Robust customer service at every piece of the pipeline goes a long way to support students’ success during their enrollment and after graduation.
- Institutions that fear the introduction of customer service as a pathway to becoming a “degree mill” are often operating in a factory-style model that awards degrees to students who may not fully earn the credential.
