STUDENTS AS CUSTOMERS: AN ANALYTICAL LITERATURE REVIEW OF MARKET-ORIENTED CULTURE OF PAKISTANI UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

This analytical literature review explores how a market-oriented culture has been emerging in the Pakistani universities, and how the culture has influenced the implementation of students as a customer in a more competitive process in the higher education settings. Due to globalization, waning state funding, and institutional competition, most of the universities are embracing business like practices that place more emphasis on branding, higher enrollment, job marketability discourses, and student satisfaction indicators. This study follows the PRISMA Framework 2020 to describe the ways in which market logic distorts university identity, faculty roles and student self-conceptions with the help of an interpretive and contextual analysis of market logic and extant literature. Initially 243 articles were included in the study after removal of duplicate and irrelevant articles 132 articles were chosen to describe this broader area, However the 64 articles are cited in this high stake literature review. The results indicate that there is profoundly different cultural transformation where education is becoming a private investing, as opposed to a state good. Students are the consumers, faculty members are the service providers and in the institutional success is market shared and reputation. As much as these practices enhanced responsiveness and efficiency in administrative life, create tensions in the academic life. There is evidences of threats to grade inflation, degraded academic rigor, transactional teacher-student relationships and ultimately erosion of ethical and intellectual responsibilities. In Pakistan’s economical sustainability and International competitiveness is crucial to focus but also the maintenance of academic integrity, professional ethics, critical thinking, and social responsibility cannot be undermined. A balanced policy is confidentially required with respect to market demands and actual motives of university educational institutions.