There was an elongation of time and a certain quiet as the petri dish of infectious waste hit the floor.

I was 19, sterilising infectious waste in a lab over Summer – and filling in because the incumbent had caught typhoid from a previous accident. But there was no shrieking, not even a tut-tut – just some tired-looking people in white coats doing their best to mop things up while I stood still wondering if I was going to live until the staff picnic that afternoon.

The most interesting aspect of my less-than illustrious career in waste disposal is the realisation that most people in universities are actually pretty decent and most appear quite pleasant.

This was quite an eye-opener for an undergraduate in the 1980s. While many lecturers remained remote but pleasant, the administrative staff in the front line of my august institution appeared to be a whole sub-strata of humanity to themselves. Sure they varied the way they talked to you – choosing between sarcasm, hysteria or astonishing depths of rudeness – but their characteristic lack of helpfulness was endemic.

Groan, stares or bark at the trifles that I timidly attempted to resolve – the only smile appearing when an insurmountable obstacle was reached – so you could presumably share the pain that they were feeling working in their unhappy roles. You want to pay your fees? It’s almost lunchtime, come back in an hour or so. You want a book? How irritating.

Little wonder, then, that twenty-something years on universities still struggle with the c-word (that’s customers in case any of you remain confused). While staff attitudes to service and helpfulness appear to have improved out of sight, universities are still incredibly uncomfortable in their own skin.

Universities evolved on the premise of public benefit and the accretion of knowledge, but the massification of higher education has led to a belated realisation that someone has to pay for it.

As government funding has declined and revenue from research commercialisation has grown – at best – in a sluggish fashion; student revenue is the difference between institutional prosperity and the next redundancy round. Public good remains a cherished goal – but market share is the only way universities can continue to hope to achieve it.

In this context, the deregulation of domestic student recruitment caps in 2012 forges a permanent link between the concepts of ‘student’ and ‘customer’. Students, with greater buying power, will gradually shift their enrolments to the institutions they prefer and universities, terrified of shrinking enrolments, will be forced to ensure that service standards at the very least match those of their competitors.

The complication of this notion of student as customer is that universities do not – and must not – provide the same levels of service as a shop or a movie theatre. The student customer is not always right (why else would they be seeking to learn more); they cannot be guaranteed satisfaction if pass-fail standards are to be maintained and they will not choose a university based on the same superficial assumptions that inspire them to purchase a soft drink or a movie ticket.

At the same time, aspects of being a customer do apply to universities – namely the understanding that students are seeking a return on the investment of their time and fees; and that they expect satisfactory levels of service.

In order to allay the fears of colleagues about the convergence of students and customer concepts, and recognise the emergence of a new hybrid of student-consumers, etymological experts would do well to invest some of their Christmas holidays dreaming up a new term to clarify the issue – as ‘stumers’ and ‘custents’ both sound like medical maladies.

Prevailing wisdom, as played out in marketing approaches across the sector, is that these student-consumers want a degree as a conduit to a career. But how much guidance do they need to choose a career that best suits them – and equips Australia with the phalanx of shiny new smartworkers promised by the Federal Government’s agenda? How do we avoid an economy riddled with accountants but absent of ethicists.

And will these student-consumers suddenly start clamouring for postgraduate places in greater numbers as those who hitherto would have relied on a Bachelor degree to make them special in the workplace now seek a higher qualification?

The new era of deregulation in 2012 offers much promise and opportunity, as well as greater uncertainty for universities. The one certainty is that service – that concept of being respectful and helpful to others during the course of one’s day – is set to be engrained into the fabric of universities. Many of us who had our first taste of higher education a couple of decades ago will be hoping that trend will be a permanent one.