Junior and community colleges in an attempt to establish themselves took the lead in many of these consumer oriented changes. The product orientation of higher education hindered its predicting and planning for the current situation, even though the data was becoming available 18-20 years ago. Even now one must seriously question if current competitive responses are related to consumer sensitivity or to the behavior of their major sources of revenue, state legislatures and federal agencies. As the question of what constitutes institutional success is many-faceted and probably will never have a definitive answer, the widely applied measurement continues to be student enrollment. The distinction between viewing students as consumers or as products has some important implications for our process of institutional objective setting.
Higher education is only one of the many forces that affect the lives of our students.
Thus, in reality we have the opportunity to influence only a small part of this development process. In addition there is a real question regarding the impact we have on that portion with which we do interact. Most institutions who point with pride to the quality of their graduates, in something other than just a general sense or a few specific cases, are in a position to restrict entry only to those who would have a high probablity of success regardless of how they spent the time allocated to the educational process. A few institutions compensate for a lack of this input selectivity by rigourous procedures of elimination during the earning of a degree. This approach of quality checks during the process focuses attention on what happens in the process and seems logical.