The Ethics of Expectations

Some time ago I wrote in this space about how people were spending tens of thousands of dollars – frequently money they had borrowed under student loan programs – on culinary programs in the mistaken belief that such a credential could immediately land them a $60,000 a year job on graduation. At the time I was rather harsh on the students, noting that entry-level jobs in that field range from $8 to $12 per hour, and pointing out that there are any number of free resources online that would allow anyone to verify that statistic if they bother to look. But we should also acknowledge that sometimes these students are actively deceived by unscrupulous education companies, who promise to provide special instruction that would allow their own students to bypass those entry-level jobs and move directly into high paying positions – or, at least, that’s what a class action lawsuit filed in Federal Court this week is claiming…

You can pick up the story off the Courthouse News site if you want to, but the story is simple enough. Members of the class are claiming that they were given false and unrealistic promises by the culinary school they attended, and are now stuck with $45,000 or more of student debt they can’t possible pay off and completely useless training – or, at least, nothing that would get them better than the aforementioned $8 to $12 per hour jobs. Suits of this kind are popping up more and more often, and I don’t intend to comment on the ethics of lying to your students, or any other customer, about the relative value and utility of the services you provide; I don’t feel there is any other side to the discussion. Preying upon the hopes and dreams (and naivety) of the customer in this fashion is fraud, and I hope the person or persons responsible are charged with criminal offenses and sued repeated in civil court as well. But this does raise the question of how far a company should be required to go in order to discourage potential customers…

Consider, if you will, that all service-based companies make money by providing some kind of (hopefully useful) service to their customers. Expecting an educational institution of any kind to turn away prospective students with money in hand isn’t reasonable, any more than expecting any other kind of service business to reject a customer would be, provided that the student can afford the course of study and has a reasonable chance of obtaining the credentials promised and getting the results he or she desires. But what about the case where one or more of these conditions do not clearly apply?

Suppose, for example, that there are high-paying jobs in the field in question, but only a few of them each year for thousands of applicants – can we still expect the school to refuse this student? What if there are jobs in the field, but the student in question is unlikely to complete the program or obtain sufficiently impressive credentials to get any of them? What if there are jobs available, and the student can qualify to get them, but the student loans they will need to complete the course of study will destroy their economic future and eliminate any chance of their buying a house or saving for retirement? How bad do someone’s chances of completing the ambition that brought them to the school have to be before we can reasonably expect the institution to send them away?

Which leads me to the question: do we, as managers, have an ethical responsibility to our customers to refuse them service if we believe that they have no chance of receiving the full benefit they want from our company? Does our answer change if we have provided the customer with a complete breakdown of the field, the service and the odds of success, but they persist anyway? No reasonable person is going to suggest that a qualified customer who can afford service should be denied it, or that a customer with a completely unrealistic expectation should be served. But at what point do someone’s odds of success become so bad that we must tell them to give up on our services and look for some other approach?

It’s worth thinking about…