From Customers to Partners: The Future of the Student–University Relationship
- Ben Rogers
- Sep 23, 2025
- 6 min read
By Ben Rogers, Associate Principal Consultant / 18 September 2025
Introduction: A relationship at a crossroads
In the UK higher education sector, the relationship between students and universities has undergone a quiet but profound transformation over the last two decades. Once defined by tradition, scholarship, and community, it has increasingly been reframed in the language of markets and transactions. Students are frequently described as customers, encouraged to view their degree as a product and their experience as a service.
While the language of consumer rights has undoubtedly driven improvements in transparency and accountability, it has also created distance between students and institutions. It frames the relationship as a one-way exchange: money for services, satisfaction for delivery. And yet, this narrow lens overlooks the most valuable aspect of the student–university connection, the potential for partnership.
The next chapter of higher education’s evolution will demand a shift in mindset. We must move beyond the customer-service paradigm and build relationships rooted in co-creation, shared leadership, and mutual responsibility. Doing so will strengthen governance, enrich the student experience, and create institutions that are more adaptive, inclusive, and resilient.
This is not about dismantling accountability; it’s about expanding it. It’s not about ignoring student rights; it’s about empowering student voices as equal contributors to the university community. The future is not “students as customers,” nor even “students as stakeholders,” it’s students as partners.
From listening to leading: Moving beyond the tick box
In your average UK university, “student voice” is universal. It appears in governance diagrams, regulatory submissions, National Student Survey questions, and every internal policy document worth its salt. Institutions invite feedback, run student panels, and commission surveys. Senior leaders attend “student–staff liaison” meetings and dutifully read reports from the Students’ Union (SU).
Have we genuinely embedded students as partners in decision-making, or have we simply created structures that give the appearance of inclusion while retaining most of the decision-making power at the institutional centre?
Tokenistic engagement, the kind that ticks the box but changes little, risks alienating students rather than empowering them. A partnership model, by contrast, invites students not just to comment on decisions but to shape them. This means:
Co-creation of policy and practice: Students helping to design assessment strategies, wellbeing initiatives, and digital learning environments.
Shared leadership forums: Regular, candid discussions between senior teams and elected student leaders, where ideas and concerns are tackled collaboratively.
Reciprocal development: Both students and staff learning from one another’s experiences, insights, and skills.
This is a higher standard of engagement, one that demands cultural change, not just procedural change.
Why the customer model falls short
The marketisation of UK higher education, accelerated by the introduction of tuition fees and the framing of student choice as a market driver, has made the “customer” metaphor almost unavoidable. Students are encouraged to expect a return on investment, and universities are often incentivised to position themselves as service providers.
However, there are three key limitations to this model:
It narrows the definition of value
In a customer transaction, value is defined by what is delivered to the consumer. In higher education, the true value comes not just from what the university provides, but from what the student creates, contributes, and becomes through their participation.
It erodes mutual responsibility
The customer model can unintentionally foster passivity, the idea that the institution is responsible for delivering success, and the student is merely there to receive it. A partnership model reframes success as co-owned.
It doesn’t prepare students for the complexity of the world beyond university
Graduates will need to navigate workplaces, communities, and civic life as active participants, not passive consumers. Modelling partnership within the university context is part of their education.
This is not to say the customer metaphor is entirely without merit - rights, standards, and accountability matter. But they should sit within a richer framework of shared endeavour.
Students’ Unions as strategic partners
Students’ Unions are often seen, at least in procedural terms, as stakeholders to be consulted. But, SUs and elected student leaders are in fact strategic partners, capable of influencing culture, driving innovation, and holding institutions to their highest values.
Student leaders bring:
Breadth of representation: They channel the voices of thousands of students, across disciplines, backgrounds, and lived experiences.
Cultural insight: They are often closer to emerging trends in student life, from wellbeing needs to digital behaviours.
Policy agility: Operating in fast-moving, politically aware environments, they can pivot quickly in response to new challenges.
Yet, institutional engagement with SUs is often inconsistent. Some senior leaders enjoy rich, trust-based relationships with their SU counterparts; others keep the relationship polite but distant. The result? Missed opportunities for collaboration and innovation.
A genuine partnership model would embed SU engagement into the heart of university governance and strategic planning. That means:
Jointly chaired committees on key priorities (e.g., equity, digital transformation, sustainability).
Shared accountability for progress on student experience outcomes.
Mutual investment in leadership development for both senior leaders and SU officers.
Building the infrastructure for partnership
Partnership doesn’t happen by accident; it requires structures, skills, and sustained commitment. Here’s what that infrastructure might look like sector-wide:
Leadership Roundtables
Regular, themed dialogues between senior leaders and student officers on big questions: What does an inclusive curriculum look like? How can we design a wellbeing strategy that genuinely works?
Reciprocal Mentoring
Pairing senior leaders with student leaders for two-way mentoring, where both sides bring knowledge, insight, and challenge to the table.
Immersion Opportunities
Senior leaders spend time within SUs to understand the operational pressures, political dynamics, and leadership challenges officers face, and vice versa.
Shared Development Programmes
Training on compassionate leadership, conflict navigation, and power-sharing, designed for mixed cohorts of student and staff leaders.
Evaluation and Impact Tracking
Measuring not just satisfaction, but the tangible outcomes of partnership working, policy changes, improved retention, and increased inclusion.
The cultural shift required
Moving from customers to partners is not primarily a structural challenge; it’s a cultural one. It demands changes in mindset at all levels of the institution:
From control to trust: Trusting students to help shape decisions, even when their perspectives challenge the status quo.
From consultation to collaboration: Moving away from “we’ll listen, then decide” towards “we’ll decide together.”
From symbolic to substantive: Making student partnership a driver of change, not a public relations exercise.
It also requires humility from both sides. For university leaders, this means accepting that students, even in their brief tenure, can bring transformative insight. For students, it means recognising that institutional change is complex and requires sustained commitment.
Student partnership in practice: Learning from the sector
The UK higher education sector already has strong foundations to build upon when it comes to embedding students as partners. Work such as the Students as Partners evaluation project, highlighted by QAA’s Enhancement Themes, demonstrates how institutions and students can share collective responsibility for shaping teaching and learning. Sparqs (Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland) has established an international reputation for embedding student partnership into quality processes.
Together, these examples show that meaningful collaboration is possible and impactful, moving beyond consultation into genuine co-creation of change.
Why now?
The timing for this shift could not be more critical. Higher education is facing:
Financial pressures: Partnerships can drive more efficient, targeted use of resources.
Heightened expectations: Today’s students expect their voices to be heard and acted upon.
Complex societal challenges: From mental health to climate change, the problems universities face are too big to solve without collective leadership.
In an era where trust in institutions is fragile, genuine partnership offers a route to rebuild confidence and demonstrate relevance.
Looking ahead: A vision for 2030
If we get this right, by 2030 the language of “students as customers” will feel outdated. Instead, we’ll talk about:
Co-ownership of the university experience: where decisions are made with, not for, students.
Integrated leadership development: where student leaders leave office having developed skills equivalent to early-career executives.
Institutional agility: where insight flows freely between students and staff, enabling rapid, informed responses to change.
And perhaps most importantly, we’ll see graduates who enter the world beyond university already practiced in the art of collaboration, partnership, and civic responsibility.
Conclusion: Beyond the transaction
The student–university relationship is too important to be reduced to a service contract. Students are not simply paying customers; they are active members of a university family and the wider local community, potential co-creators of institutional success, and future leaders in their own right.
By investing in shared leadership cultures, embedding partnership into governance, and trusting students with meaningful influence, universities can move from transactional service delivery to transformational collaboration.
In a world where challenges are complex and change is constant, partnership is not just an ideal; it’s a necessity. The universities that embrace it will not only deliver better outcomes for students; they will secure a stronger, more sustainable future for themselves and for the sector as a whole.
Strive Higher can help universities take this further by:
Facilitating structured partnership frameworks that help institutions and Students’ Unions design policies and initiatives collaboratively.
Delivering leadership development and training that equips staff and students with the skills needed for authentic partnership working.
Providing evaluation and feedback mechanisms to track the impact of partnership approaches on student experience and institutional performance.
Supporting universities in scaling best practices from initiatives like sparqs across different contexts and disciplines.
If you’re interested in having a conversation with us about how we can support you, get in touch.
