Students as Clients: A Professional Services Model for Business Education.

The paper provides comments on an article about the limitations of the student-as-customer model for guiding the operations of a business school. The article proposed a student-as-junior-partner analogy. The purpose of the article is to describe a professional services student-as-client model that offers a more realistic guide for core business school operations than either the customer model or the partner model. The next section of the paper begins by noting the situations where the partner model is well suited and shows why it is not realistic for most programs. The paper then defines the client analogy, illustrates how it offers a better fit, and describes some of the insights that it suggests. For the undergraduate and MBA programs at the core of a business school's teaching activities, the client model provides a much more useful analogy than either the partner model or the customer model. On the other hand, the partner model is well suited to exceptional programs such as the Ph.D.