At the world education market conference in Canada last year, it was taken as given that universities would not be among the main providers of learning in the knowledge society of the 21st century. Nowhere is the reason for this exclusion better illustrated than in Alex Millmow's article (Opinion 11/1).

Drawing on reports of the Australia Institute's reputed finding that academics are under increasing pressure to pass fee-paying students, Millmow is the latest of many voices to join the chorus lamenting the demise of standards in a once-proud institution - the university.

Only this time the debate is not about funding levels. For Millmow, the issue seems to be about the annoying inconvenience of complaining students - both fee and HECS-paying - in that the lot of them are now active in "pestering" him about all aspects of their learning, from exams to essays to explanations.

For academics such as Millmow, the changes that are taking place on campus are distressing. He particularly objects to a "virulent form of rent-seeking" that he interprets as a wholesale breakdown in "academic etiquette". Read: students should be grateful for what they can get, rather than trying to seek greater satisfaction.

By rent-seeking, Millmow means that students are demanding to pass subjects and courses when, in his view, they have not put in the required effort. They "try to persuade, sometimes intimidate" staff into giving them better grades, to put them at the top of the class. Worse still, they are also said to be questioning syllabuses, assessments, and pedagogy.

To many on the outside, such actions on the part of consumers - students (all of whom are paying for their education) - appear as nothing more than a cry for quality in the products, or in the standard of customer service they are receiving.

What is surprising about this is not that students are speaking out, but that it has taken them until now to register some of their dissatisfactions, that, as consumers, they have entered a contract to pay for skills, qualifications, teaching assistance - but that they haven't necessarily got what the university is supposed to deliver.

Academics may deplore the job-conscious mentality of today's students, (who are usually more interested in the pay-off of their educational experience than education for its own sake). But the reality is that today's school-leavers are products of the knowledge economy. They are acutely aware of the short shelf life of knowledge, and the need to constantly upgrade their skills - as quickly as possible.

Understandably, they have a different agenda from many traditional academics who are often more interested in maintaining (and protecting) a body of knowledge than they are in information turnover and customer service.

That is why there will inevitable be a clash of cultures.

But it will not be resolved by complaints from the academic establishment that in making clear their pragmatic consumer demands, the fee-paying students are lowering the standards.

The challenge for the university is to rethink its knowledge base, and to repackage its information, so that while the "quality of content" and the desired "critical-thinking ability" are retained, the courses and programs are considered by students to be worth paying for.

There's no point in lamenting the loss of the ivory tower; like every other business, the university has to restructure and meet the different demands of the knowledge economy. And there's a lot of room for improvement.

Too often the assumption is that academic offerings are beyond reproach, that the product cannot be improved and that all is perfect in pedagogical paradise. Yet patently this is not always the case.

Course outlines as described in handbooks are not the ones that are delivered in the classroom. University teachers are devoid of teaching expertise. Promised support services fail to materialise. (Academics themselves even claim that the funding shortage has produced such dreadful consequences.)

Students who have direct experience of these university failures are well within their rights to complain that there are extenuating circumstances if and when they are told that their own efforts are not up to standard.

Increasingly the value of university education is being questioned - and not just by students. (How long should it take? Should graduates have to be job-ready? What is the relationship between learning and earning - and what sort of knowledge should the university be generating?)

There are countless examples of the ramifications, particularly in the new information areas. The US consulate in Melbourne, for example, recently advertised for a specialist IT manager, and while degree applicants were acceptable, so too was someone who had relevant work experience and knowledge - and who could do the job. This is an agency that has been more than committed to graduate-only employees in the past.

The hallmark of the knowledge society is change. All the time. Nothing can stay the same. Not businesses, not students, not universities. And universities cannot hide from such change by cloaking their resistance in terms of standards.

This is why the claim that the problem is about etiquette, or mediocrity, or the threat to quality because students are fee-paying, makes a mockery of the very values of critical analysis and thinking that the university espouses. Open-mindedness demands that the university also examines its own part in the process.

Universities could be better served by viewing the student input as feedback, which can be constructively used to modernise the institution and repackage the product. When treated as market research - rather than a whinge about the state of academia - this type of consumer feedback can be valuable and insightful. And it should be acted upon rather than scoffed at as some "flaky motto of supermarket managers". Because sometimes the customer is right.