I know that many faculty don't like to think of education as a product or students as customers. I actually embraced this quite a while ago, but with a twist. For quite a few years now I have told students the following "joke" related to students being customers.

My customer, the person I'm trying to help out, isn't the student sitting in my class today. My customer is the future version of them in 5-10 years. The person I am looking out for is who they will become and my job is to make sure that their future selves have the ability to thrive in the technological workplace so they can make the life that they want. (Then the punchline.) My job is to help build the best future version of them and if I have to destroy the current version to do that, then so be it.

Note that this can only be said after I have established a certain rapport with the class. It fits in well with my image as being a hard professor, but I feel there is a lot of truth in this up until the punchline. Colleges don't exist to make students happy and to satisfy their current needs. Colleges exist to prepare them for their later lives, whatever that might be. In the case of CS, a lot of this is skill oriented. Students need to be able to craft software and get computers to solve problems. If they are good at that when they graduate, they can generally navigate a successful path in life.

The focus on the future self of students also highlights that colleges often get a fair bit of their funds from philanthropy. It behooves us to make sure that our students are successful so that they are more likely to donate to the University after they have graduated. The real goal is to get to a point where more of our money comes from that source than from the tuition of the current students. Only a few schools in the nation are at that point. Trinity isn't quite there, but I think they could be before I retire. The pandemic definitely isn't helping in that regard though. CS is a field that can move online fairly easily compared to many other disciplines, but online teaching doesn't highlight the strengths of a small liberal arts institution like Trinity. There are still advantages to small class sizes though. When students get hung up on problems in CS, it is exceedingly helpful to be able to talk to a professor. That is something that MOOCs and large online courses can't replicate. There are questions about the value-added element of that though. How much is that really worth? I think it is hard to argue that it is worth the current price differential. Our business model is heavily based on our physical spaces. Building and maintaining those physical spaces is also a huge part of our budget. If the pandemic were to draw out too long so that the benefit of the physical spaces was negated, every small University that has their product model based on such spaces will truly suffer.

I'll close with one last thought. "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you." Hopefully people have heard the joke with this punchline. I expect a lot of small schools are going to fold in the next two years. Things were already moving that way because of demographic changes. The pandemic is going to accelerate that. For those that survive, they will get an automatic boost from the fact that students who want to have the personal contact of a small University will have fewer option to consider. I really don't expect the pandemic to change society in huge ways long-term. This isn't the first pandemic to sweep the globe. The previous ones altered life for a while, but people didn't keep wearing masks for decades after the 1918 flu pandemic. I expect something similar this time.