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Over the past decades, higher education has attempted to define its student population using metaphors (Hoffman and Kretovics, 2004). This has inevitably given rise to multiple metaphors of which three are more frequently used - 'the student as customer' metaphor (Comesky, McCool, Byrnes, and Weber, 1992; Emery, Kramer, and Tian, 2001; Pitman, 2000; Tovote, 2001); 'the student as product' metaphor (Emery et al., 2001; Srivanci, 1996); and 'the student as employee' metaphor (Halbesleben, Becker, and Buckley, 2003; Helms and Key, 1994). Although it seems logical to employ multiple metaphors simultaneously given the diverse nature of higher education in general (Hoffman and Kretovics, 2004), the current paper focuses only on the student-as-customer concept from the Malaysian perspective. Accordingly, it addresses a commonly debated issue, which is 'Should our students be treated like customers or not?'. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: it aims to (i) examine why it is inappropriate to adopt the student-as-customer ideology within the Malaysian context; and (ii) propose the student-as-partner metaphor as a more relevant alternative in defining the interaction between students and Malaysian public institutions of higher learning.