THE 'STUDENT-AS-CONSUMER' PARADIGM IN THE EDTECH ERA: REVIEWING MARKETING STRATEGIES AND OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION ALIGNMENT

Najassim Pasha; Dr. Y Siva Reddy; Yogesh Dixit

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21427838

Abstract

The current marketization of higher education has been greatly driven by the explosion of rapid growth of
Educational Technology (EdTech) platforms, which has consolidated the "student-as-consumer" (SaC) paradigm.
In actively marketing to create a worldwide student community, universities and EdTech providers are using
increasingly sophisticated digital marketing techniques, yet there is an important, and commonly overlooked,
disjunction between these commercial approaches and underlying pedagogical concepts, especially those rooted
in Outcome Based Education (OBE). Covering a wide range of studies from 2020 to 2026 across the Scopus, Web
of Science, Google Scholar and Shodhganga platforms, this integrative literature review examines the inherent
conflict between the "educational brand value" of an institution, which is often emotional, convenient and based
on career ROI projections, and the more rigorous, evidence-based metrics of OBE and student retention. This
paper builds a clear relationship between the current service marketing theories, including Service-Dominant
Logic (SDL), and the pedagogical tools used in schools, such as curriculum mapping, in order to explain the direct
impact of the dissensus between marketing and academic realities on student attrition and dissatisfaction. The
findings that emerge call for the "externalization" of internal pedagogical metrics into 'public' marketing narratives
that could address and mitigate the gap between expectation and reality, whilst also supporting long term academic
integration, and institutional sustainability in a global competitive EdTech market.

Keywords

Not provided

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