The largest segments that should not be served: higher education marketing serving the growing slacker segment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to recognize how common practices of selling textbooks to university educators provide the tools for the faculty to minimize their teaching efforts. When coupled with higher education practices that see students as customers, such as university administrators' day‐to‐day goals driven by concerns of complaint avoidance, students “voting with their feet” for popular courses or the evaluation of teaching by use of students' evaluations of faculty, actual education gets minimized. Design/method/approach – The paper describes common supplemental teaching aids provided to adopters of textbooks, but noting that the extensive use of these tools results in decreasing outcomes of student learning. The textbook publishers are using good marketing practices in that these textbook supplements target faculty who teach large numbers of students every year. In turn, the faculty who rely on these aids can become very popular with students. However, marketing to these segments of faculty and (indirectly) to these students might actually encourage the growth of these segments to the detriment of the smaller numbers of students who actually want an education and faculty would be willing to do the work to provide it. Findings – The paper finds that, while popular attention such as the US “No Child Left Behind” legislation has been toward the primary education levels to ensure students are actually learning to read and write and while high schools increasingly use high stakes testing before students are allowed to graduate, the marketing practices of higher education could be serving the decline of thinking among college graduates. Textbooks target sales to faculty who want quantities of teaching aids to simplify the work, and schools can make classes more popular by asking students to do less thinking. Originality/value – The paper provides a critical statement of common higher education practices that are not widely known or whose dangers are ignored.