First in Bologna and then in Paris, this series has looked at the 12th and 13th century origins of the modern higher education institutions (HEIs) we refer to as universities and colleges. Described as a process of confluence and conflict, the heritage was casually framed within power analyses common to sociology. Then, as today, there were macro economic and political forces that acted to transform and maintain the functions of higher education (HE), while individuals and groups jockeyed for favourable position within the system social milieu. We have seen that the modern conception and expression of a university are derived from the Latin, universitas, which in its original academic form were groups of teachers and students united in pursuit of intimately related and mutually beneficial goals that had manifest and latent impact on HE and society at large (Merton, 1957). We have also seen how the introduction of endowed colleges and salaried lectureships inserted a wedge of powerful papal and royal interests into the teacher-student relationship. As a result, our inheritance was not a university of masters and scholars, but of bloated buildings, budgets, and bureaucracies.
This third series instalment journeys forward to the 18th and 19th centuries. By this time, the HEI progeny of medieval HE have taken the form that is now so familiar. HE is identical to its catalogue of ranked and reified institutions. This HEI model is so well entrenched that for many it seems inconceivable that the social good of HE could be provided in the absence of modern universities and colleges. But history demonstrates that it can, while the model being presented here demonstrates that it should, through the introduction of a professional society of academics (PSA).
As a means of organizing work, professions arrived rather
late to the game. Certainly, many of the occupations such as lawyer and doctor existed
long before the late 17th century, when they began to distinguish
themselves as professions in the modern sense of the term. Not surprisingly,
sociologists were the first to investigate the transformation of an occupation
to a profession, followed rather reluctantly by the historians. Though within
both disciplines there is no universal agreement on how to study and define a
profession, here are two attempts from sociological approaches. The first comes
from the structural-functionalist taxonomic (or trait) approach, which was
popular mid-20th century, while the second is the conflict theory
(or power) approach, introduced in the latter half of the century.
1) Borrowing from Parsons (1954)
and Greenwood (1957), Cavar (2021) says: Professions possess certain criteria,
such as emotional neutrality and equal treatment of all clients (universalism),
working for the common good, not one’s own interests (impartiality), loyalty to
a professional group, specialization for certain issues and the acquisition of
social status based on the ability of professionals rather than inheritance, …[along
with] systematic knowledge, professional authority and credibility, member
regulation and control, ethical code, and professional culture. (pg. 84)
2) [A]ccording to the conflict theory
approach, professions are exclusive groups effective in closing off some part
of the labour market, while the professionalization in that way represents a
successful legal regulation and an establishment of boundaries that preserve
the position of the profession in the market, but also the position of its
members in society, i.e., their income, status and power (Cavar, 2021, pg. 87).
Professions are considered to be both a symptom and scaffold
of modernization. They are championed and chastised. They are compared and contrasted to trade guilds
and unions. They are blended with and bastioned from other forms of work. They are
heterogeneous in their evolution and homogeneous in their devolution – which
perhaps spells the demise of a designation that some claim has always been a
fiction (Cavar, 2021, pg. 81).
As with the two previous posts, this one relies on a loose
socio-historical framework of power analysis. Though the post aims for accuracy,
it does not aim to be comprehensive, as it relies principally on a single
article for its organization: the 2003 publication, Eighteenth-Century
Lawyers and the Advent of the Professional Ethos, by Penelope J Corfield.
This work is limited to the legal profession in England, but since the article speaks
to the legal, social, and psychological dimensions of its origins, it serves nicely
as foil to illuminate the professional attributes of PSA. In combination with supplementary
material, portions of Corfield will be quoted, followed by comment and
connection to the PSA model.
The Rise of Professions and PSA
To begin, Corfield (2003) describes the social position of
lawyers as paradoxical. On the one hand, they represent a critical piece of the
modern social mosaic, namely the rule of law. On the other, at the expense of
client and community, they are often thought to take advantage of this position
in pursuit of material self-interests.
In the eighteenth century…it
was the confidential lawyer who dealt with everything requiring financial and
legal acumen. He was the one who always knew what to do. ‘To counsel a
Counsellor, or advise a Lawyer, is to light a Candle at Noon-day’, declared a
theatrical attorney proudly, in 1736.
Here, then, was scope for
social tension as well as for social power. The lawyers had their fingers in
every pie. That meant that they knew everyone’s secrets. As a consequence, they
were admired but also feared and resented. There was a perceptible current of
anti-lawyerism - rather as there is often a tradition of anti-clericalism in
Catholic countries, where the priests also know the secrets of the
confessional. All providers of professional services are potentially vulnerable
to this sort of criticism, because their ‘product’ is ‘invisible’ and cannot be
easily scrutinised.
Hence the clients always fear
that they are being deceived. However, it should be stressed that
anti-lawyerism was not the same as opposition to the principle of Law, just as
anti-clericalism in Catholic countries is not associated with irreligion. On
the contrary. The higher the esteem for the cause, the greater the pressures on
those serving the cause to live up to its high ideal.
Two particular issues added specific fuel to anti-lawyer feeling. One was the cost of getting legal advice and of going to law. In fact, the remuneration of the professional lawyers was very varied. Few reached the heights of the great barristers at the end of the eighteenth century, who might earn the massive incomes of £10,000 [CPI of nearly £900,000 today] a year or more. But the lawyers were, popularly, believed to be making money from other people’s troubles. That was never appreciated, especially when legal procedures were very slow as well as costly.
Another quite different
grievance was the role of the so-called “under-strappers” at law, also known as
the ‘hedge’ attorneys or ‘Wapping attorneys’, on the margins of respectability.
These were the profession’s ‘tail’ of poor lawyers - multitudinous,
competitive, and often unscrupulous - who scraped a living by undertaking small
tasks for the poor and illiterate. These poor attorneys did in fact perform a
valid social and commercial role. (pp.9-10)
The question is, can a similar paradox be expected for academics
under the PSA model for HE?
Like lawyers, academics have lost much of their initial
prestige and increasingly find themselves maligned or vilified by society and students.
Like lawyers, academics offer a credence good and so quality is not easy to
measure. Like lawyers, their field of service is a cornerstone of modern
society in general and the professions in particular, since specialized knowledge
and HE credential are elemental to the designation. Of course, the bitter irony
is that the academic labour which makes possible the designation is itself not
organized as a profession, but rather the sporadically unionized, generally
precarious employees of universities and colleges.
Not withstanding important distinctions that will be made in
due course, at least prima facie, lawyers and academics have occupational
commonalities that portend a shared paradoxical existence. But how do HEIs
compare?
Through the essential labour of their academic employees,
HEIs offer a service that likewise “is ‘invisible’ and cannot be easily
scrutinised” and so “the clients always fear that they are being deceived” –
clients that include not only students, but industry employers and taxpaying
citizens. At the same time, the cost of going to an HEI and getting an
education is substantial for individuals and sky-high for society, while the remuneration
of the academic employees is very varied, with few reaching the heights of the full-time
and tenured professors. To make matters worse, as public financial support for
the HEI model waxes and wanes in response to government policy, societal values,
technological changes, and economic realities, competition and conflict has
intensified among institutions (universities and colleges) and individuals (academics
and students). As a result, the occupational ‘tail’ of poor academics, who are multitudinous
and competitive, scrape a living by taking short-term employment contracts with
low pay, no benefits, and high insecurity – though these poor academics perform
a valid social and commercial role. As response, there has been a steady push
to unionize academic, teaching assistant, and graduate assistant labour,
but this response is inferior to PSA.
The parallels continue between the 18th century
legal community and modern HEIs with their academic employees. Take corruption
in pursuit of material self-interest as an example. Whether its institutions or
individuals, corruption in HE has been around from the outset. Recounting the electoral
process for salaried lectureship during the 14th and 15th
centuries, Cobban (Spring 1985) says, “Given the extent of the chicanery
encompassing elections to lectureships in southern Europe, it is little wonder
that not all academic appointments were of a suitable nature. At their worst
extreme, elections were so corrupt that they were tantamount to selling
lectureships to the highest bidder, who might be totally unfitted for a
teaching post” (pg. 677). As students were key voters in such elections, there
was also “the perennial difficulty of distinguishing the bona fide current
students from, for example, ex-students still resident in the town, or from the
servants of wealthy students, or from university employees, any of whom might
try to impersonate genuine students at the time of election,” while corrupt
university officials in charge of official matriculation lists were bribed to
enter “the names of members of the town who formed a paid voting party on
behalf of one of the candidates” (Cobban, Spring 1985, pg. 675).
Jumping half a millennium ahead, we find eight highly ranked
American universities enthralled in bribery scandals worth millions, including
the Stanford University sailing program which accepted a reported $770,000 in bribes to recommend students
for admission. Or in China where over the course of his career, the head of admissions at top-ranked
Renmin University accepted millions in bribes to admit students, as other notable
Chinese institutions routinely charge illegal “admission fees” as bribes to
admit students. With perhaps less criminality and greater tacit acceptance, there
is the long-standing practice of HEIs admitting substandard students as favor
for institutional support in the form of large monetary donations and campus
improvements or to stack a college team with athletic talent. These examples
are rooted in the HEI model, which is overseen to one degree or another by
state departments, accreditation boards, HEI administrations, and academic
associations.
Gaming the HE system is a world-wide problem that contributes
to the shared paradoxical nature of the legal profession and the HEI model, and
which, again, might reasonably lead one to conclude the same is inevitable in PSA.
However, as we return to Corfield’s (2003) account of how 18th
century lawyers used professionalization to remedy their troubles, we will also
learn how PSA has unique features that help it escape the worst of the corruptive
paradoxes.
Historically, the resolution
of what was to be done eventually came via the regulation of the professions. This
created a legal framework within which these knowledge-based specialist
services were able to operate, simultaneously consolidating their respectability
and reassuring their clients. It was by no means clear, however, how the
procedures of professional regulation would come about and which mechanisms
would be adopted. Within continental Europe in the ancien régime era,
the characteristic response was via state action. Prussia was an exemplar,
instituting bureaucratic controls over a relatively restricted number of University-trained
and state-registered attorneys. This has been described as a process of ‘professionalization
from above’. In the unfolding Anglo-American tradition, however,
self-regulation was the preferred mechanism from the start. There was still a
role for the state. But it characteristically acted at ‘arms-length’, providing
a legal framework but leaving the implementation to the professionals. [H]owever,
the route was far from straightforward or linear or conflict-free. There was no
one right answer to the question of how to regulate the professions; and
certainly no single route to establish an ethos of professional responsibility
to the lay public. (pg.17)
…
[In 1729 far-reaching legislation
ensued.] The new scheme required attorneys to undertake a five-year articled
clerkship before enrolment, which would be permitted only after a personal
interview with a judge and upon payment of a fee. ...The
solution…was also highly characteristic of the English system: the assessment
of basic professional competence was not considered a matter for the state but
for the law courts. (pg.18)
…
Continuing complaints,
however, indicated that the legislation had not succeeded. The judges had too
little time to undertake careful tests and, given that they did not themselves employ
attorneys, they had no direct interest in making the system work. (pg.18)
…
[T]he lawyers themselves began
to take a hand. In February 1740, a private society had been established, in
the ‘associational’ style that was so typical in eighteenth-century England. It
was organised by a handful of London attorneys and solicitors, who dubbed
themselves the Society of Gentlemen Practisers of Law. (pg.19)
…
Confidently, if quite informally,
the Law Society began to act as a lobby group for the profession. It monitored
changes to the legal system; it petitioned parliament on legal questions; and
it provided advice on drafting bills. This was relatively controversial. But,
remarkably, the Society also decided sweepingly ‘to detect and discountenance
all male [= bad] and unfair practice’. To do that, it began to vet candidates
for enrolment before the courts and, on its own authority, to prosecute
notorious examples of lawyers who were unsuitable for the occupation. (pg.19)
…
Nonetheless, it was remarkable
that an elite group of London lawyers had established its right to speak for
the profession. Moreover, the ‘Gentlemen Practisers’ were publicly accepted in
this role, both by the law courts and by successive governments. By the 1790s,
the London attorney’s club was styling itself simply as ‘the Law Society’. (pg.19)
…
Clearly, the lawyers hoped to
link advocacy of their own respectability with fair dealings for their clients.
It was a variant of the old maxim ‘noblesse oblige’, now rendered for practical
purposes into ‘professionalism oblige’. So insistent was the case for defending
group identity that other societies were similarly established within the
common law system world-wide. Early examples were the Law Club of Ireland in
1791 and numerous lawyers’ clubs and associations within North America from the
1730s onwards. All this indicated a clubbable profession, with a strong sense
of identity and corporate pride, which counter-acted the satire and criticisms
encountered in the wider world. (pg.21)
…
It was not until 1843,
however, that a workable solution was found. The ‘march’ towards
self-regulation was proceeded via considerable debate and improvisation. In the
1810s, the legal profession itself had been through a process of some turmoil,
leading to the creation of a new reform-minded London Law Institution in 1823. …
It inaugurated public lectures and set examinations for articled clerks. Such
vigour carried all before it, and in 1832, the two attorneys’ associations
merged into one. This combined association…kept the resonant old name of ‘the
Law Society’. Such was its renewed confidence that, in 1843, it sponsored legislation
that would give itself powers to undertake the examination and accreditation of
lawyers, on behalf of the state. To this novel step, Parliament promptly agreed.
(pp.21-22)
Professional self-regulation, with
the ‘arms-length’ blessing of the state, had thus officially arrived. The
activities that the Law Society had been undertaking, with varying diligence
and effect, for the last hundred years now became their official remit. Regulation
was also made compulsory. It was necessary to pass the qualifying examinations
and to hold accreditation by the Law Society, in order to practice throughout
England and Wales. In this way, the political system both acknowledged and
enhanced what had already been instituted in an ad hoc way within the
profession itself. The pre-existing role of the Law Society made this solution
seem simple and obvious. There was no great outcry. Moreover, there was no
vested legal interest to oppose the change, as the Law Society itself proposed
the reform. The ‘quack lawyers’, like the ‘quack doctors’ after them, did not
dare to oppose the righteous demand for qualified professionalism. (pg.22)
[Along with similar reformation
of the medical profession in 1858,] these were the experts, with the
specialist knowledge that was required to test the merits of would-be
practitioners. Yet regulation and accreditation was done on the ultimate
authority of the state, which in effect defended the rights of the general
public. Clients needed the reassurance that those who purported to be
professional experts were validly accredited and that those who defaulted could
be struck from the register. (pp.22-23)
Service to the public rather
than pure money-grubbing became enshrined as the required professional ethos. Of
course, it was not always followed perfectly; and arguments still continue as
to how effectively the professional bodies carry out their regulatory mission.
But the principle was clear. An unfettered laissez-faire had yielded eventually
to the case for formalised regulation by the experts themselves. As the
regulatory bodies on behalf of the state, the modern professional associations
are thus sui generis. They are sometimes compared with either the medieval
craft guilds or the modern trade unions. But neither comparison is exact. The
professional associations have a much wider nation-wide membership than had the
localised medieval guilds; and the professional associations have a
state-appointed regulatory role as ‘masters’ of their business that is not
shared by the employee-based trade unions. A new organisational force had
arrived within the modern economy. (pg.23)
With Corfield’s account in mind, it is now time to explore
in greater detail how legal and HE services are similar, but also different in
ways that recommend the individual professional model for HE over the institutional
employee model we have inherited.
In the case of England’s legal services, a list of the
interested parties include: barristers, solicitors/attorneys, clients, courts
of law (judges), the government, and society at large. In HE, a comparable list
includes: academics, students, HEIs (administration), the government, and
society at large. Both services are vital to societal and individual well-being,
while HE is a necessary condition for occupations that seek the status of
profession. Further, it is commonly accepted there should be some form of
regulation or oversight that protects the public as they use these crucial
services. Finally, though in many ways similar, both service areas form their
own social matrices of responsibility, expectation, and power.
Recognizing these and earlier itemized similarities, the
basic question is how to best provide such vital services while attending to
variables such as: quality, access, cost, and compensation. The challenge is to
optimize these variables across the interests of the parties, which might be generally
described as follows: i) the service providers want the highest income for the
lowest effort; ii) the clients want the highest quality service at the lowest
private cost; iii) the state wants a service of highest quality and
accessibility, but with lowest public cost; and iv) all parties want to assume low
risk. Achieving optimal balance is no mean feat.
Let us consider each variable in turn, with the aim of
demonstrating how the professionalization of academics envisioned by PSA offers
optimization superior to that of the HEI model, while it reduces the potential
for corruptive paradoxes.
Quality
The dominant model for HE is a class of legal entities
called universities and colleges that act as intermediary gatekeepers, vetting
who can provide the service and who can receive it. The dominant model for law
is a class of legal entities called professional societies that act as
gatekeepers, vetting who can provide the service. This distinction is subtle
but important as it underscores the unnecessary middleman functions of HEIs. In
this instance, functions related to the quality of service.
There are two perspectives on quality – insurance and
assurance. Insurance is a measure of the quality of inputs for a system, while
assurance is a measure of the quality of system outputs. As Corfield says, quality
insurance in law includes vetting initiates for qualification and licensure to
practice, which at the outset was done by judges and in the end by a professional
society of peers. Assurance is measured through the quality of client referrals
made by attorneys to barristers, who succeed or fail in the courts of law. More
generally, there are outcome expectations among clients which if met would
constitute a measure of quality assurance – e.g., a will probate, deed
transfer, or divorce. The quality of such outcomes is tangible and so measurable
by the client, independently of expert assessment. This is not to say that all
legal services are plain in nature and as a matter of best practices, professions
routinely encourage second opinions.
In the HEI model for HE, measurement of quality is primarily
a matter of insurance, including input such as faculty and staff qualifications,
campus facilities, and ancillary student support. Sanctioned by the state as
at-arms-length representation of public interests, accreditation boards use
such quality insurance measures to award, suspend or deny what is essentially
the license to practice HE - or more precisely, the legislated authority to confer
degrees - without which HE offered by either institutions or individuals is unfeasible.
In most cases, these non-profit corporations are populated with academics who
are employed by the HEIs over which the boards exercise licensing authority. As
a consequence, employees of HEIs decide if HEIs receive accreditation, without
which they could not operate. This is clearly a form of self-regulation, though one that is notably different
from professional self-regulation in that the licentiates of professions are individual
practitioners, not institutional or corporate employers.
In this HE system, the limited quality assurance that exists,
is typically conducted internally and sporadically by individual HEIs through
mechanisms such as departmental and administrative grade review processes that
are either routinely conducted or initiated by students who seek grade changes.
Along with student course and instructor evaluations, there is also the limited
use of teaching performance peer-assessment. In all of these cases, the process
and results are normally not made pubic; unlike the independent and
collaborative academic publication and patent output, which, under the HEI
model, are made indistinguishable from institutional output and widely advertised.
External to the HE system quality assurance is measured by the industries that
ultimately employ graduates – industries which continually complain about their
chronic poor quality.
In contrast, at the graduate level students are evaluated with
at least some objectivity through non-random selection of identifiable third-party
examiners that review the quality of work product and its defense. At this
level of education, best practices dictate that conferment of credit or
credential should not be based solely on the say-so of an immediate service
provider (e.g., academic supervisor or institution). One major reason for this
is that a great deal of an HEI’s reputation and research funding – another measure
of quality insurance - depends on the assured quality of its postgraduates.
Further complication is added by reflection on who is responsible
for achieving a favorable service outcome. In the case of HE, quality is a
concept that applies to both academics (service providers) and students
(service users). In this way, the service relationship in HE is more like that
between a client and a trainer at a gym, than it is like that between a customer
and a technician at a garage – with the subtle distinction in meaning between
‘client’ and ‘customer’ coming into play (Greenwood, 1957). The degree of
responsibility for a quality outcome is a joint affair between trainer and
client. If the client is not committed to conscientiously following the instructions
of a qualified and competent trainer, then poor results are primarily the responsibility
of the client – notwithstanding client inclinations to rationalize assignment
of responsibility to the trainer. Conversely, where the trainer is not
qualified, competent, or conscientious in the provision of their service, then
responsibility for poor outcomes primarily lays at their feet. No doubt assignment
of responsibility can be a complicated calculation, but mutual responsibility remains
an inescapable feature of education service, as it is to a certain degree in the
legal or medical professions.
Of course, with respect to the HEI model, this analysis of
responsibility is moderated by the earlier observation that undergraduate education
leaves plenty of room for academic service providers and their HEI employers to
vary standards and manufacture outcomes that satisfy the interests of HEIs,
academics, and students, though with potential to undermine societal, state,
and industry employer interests in objective assurance of quality. Consequently,
the calibre of objective quality assurance measurement that is found in the
client-trainer analogy is best captured at the graduate level of education –
though even here a degree of variance and contrivance by the service provider
is still possible. In contrast, undergraduate education is more analogous to an
assembly line worker whose employment and advancement depend upon high quality
output, but who inspects their own work for quality and announces to their boss
that all is well, even excellent. This, of course, is questionable assurance at
best, especially in circumstances where the output is a credence good, the
employee’s job is precarious, and so are the employer’s finances.
As Corfield (2003) explains, by 1843 in England, as a means
of protecting public interests in legal services, legislated regulatory
oversight by professional society was used “to detect and discountenance all
[bad] and unfair practice” (pg. 19). The HE system also requires regulatory oversight
to “defend the rights of the general public” (Corfield, 2003, pg. 23). As
discussed in the previous series posts, initially, chancellors were used to vet
qualified masters for positions within the cathedral school system, while the
setting, conducting and marking of final exams, along with conferment of
credentials, were also under the authority of chancellors. Eventually, colleges
were charged with oversight of nearly all aspects of education, save the final
exams and conferment of credentials, which were under the purview of the universitas
(Haskins, 1923). As we now bare witness, state oversight of HE service amounts
to regulation of HEIs, through state authorised accreditation boards, while oversight
of academics is managed through HEI employment relations. This is a mix of
quasi-third-party institutional oversight through accreditation boards and first-party
employee oversight through HEIs.
So described, in a system with entrenched funding cuts, consumer
culture, limited-capacity, and precarious academic employment, the HEI model harbors
obvious conflicts of interest, where academics exercise authority over backend
quality assurance and frontend quality insurance that determines licensure for
their HEI employers. The question is to what extent the PSA model introduces
and manages conflicts of interest that affect the quality of HE.
The same sort of regulatory power entrusted to the existing professional societies is also entrusted to accreditation boards, only the former involves frontline service providers directly regulating themselves, while the latter involves frontline service providers directly regulating their institutional employers who in turn directly regulate them – the circles are closed. Where accreditation or licensing are concerned, self-regulation presents the potential for conflicts of interest, but as Corfield (2003) says, “An unfettered laissez-faire had yielded eventually to the case for formalised regulation by the experts themselves. As the regulatory bodies on behalf of the state, the modern professional associations are thus sui generis. [T]hese were the experts, with the specialist knowledge that was required to test the merits of would-be practitioners. Yet regulation and accreditation was done on the ultimate authority of the state, which in effect defended the rights of the general public” (pg. 23). Consequently, whether it is law or medicine or HE, service regulation is a question of the conscientious, ethical application by expert practitioners of effective checks and balances within the regulatory apparatus.
PSA simply and sensibly suggests that the middleman
institutional employer be cut out of the regulatory picture, calibrating HE to the
sort of self-regulation that is common to the legal, medical, psychiatric, and
other professions. As the PSA model
insists, doing so provides considerable benefits to individuals and society by
ameliorating the many serious problems of the HEI model, including corruptive
paradoxes.
PSA offers some of its amelioration through quality insurance and assurance mechanisms – its checks and balances. There are qualification requirements for admission to the Professional Society of Academics, as there are standards and codes of conduct for the provision of service. There are requirements for community service and professional development. Failure to meet any of these can result in the denial or suspension of the license to practice HE. Such a consequence is made a matter of public record, along with any other licentiate transgressions that warrant PSA punitive action. This is consistent with the regulatory powers exercised by accreditation systems and the established professions.
But where the HEI model falters on quality assurance, PSA
excels. Borrowing from and improving upon the HEI model best practices with
regard to graduate education, PSA suggests third-party evaluation at all levels
of HE; but with the added improvement of anonymous, third-party crowd-source
evaluation, rather than the HEI model practice of selecting known third-party
evaluators.
By this means, any conflicts of interest found in both
levels of HE evaluation is removed. At the same time, academic freedom is
maintained and consumer culture is tolerated. Professional academics are free
to use whatever materials, teaching methods, and evaluation schemes they like.
What they are not permitted to do is evaluate the performance of their own
students, where such evaluation contributes to formal grades that are used to
confer credit or credential. In terms of logistics, student work is made
available to other academics who use their own expert evaluation standards to
grade the quality of both the evaluation materials and the student work, grades
which are then averaged and returned with feedback to the initial service
provider and their student. This is effective quality assurance conducted by
proper qualified individuals in circumstances of anonymity among the parties.
In this circumstance, both the academic and student are
motivated to be responsible for their mutually dependent education relationship,
because both have an interest in high quality outcomes – students want good
grades and credentials, while academics want repeat and new students. Unlike
the HEI model, in PSA students cannot rely on the institutions and academic
employees whom they pay to favorably manipulate outcomes, so the responsibility
to act conscientiously in their studies is high. In a complementary fashion, the
responsibility to act conscientiously in their service provision is high for professional
academics, especially in light of an added PSA quality assurance mechanism that
requires the detailed service records of all licentiates to be made public,
creating incentive for academics to provide the best service they can and where
they faulter to seek professional development.
This is vastly superior to any quality assurance mechanism
that exist in the HEI model. It is worthy of a profession where, as Corfield
(2003) says, “The higher the esteem for the cause, the greater the pressures on
those serving the cause to live up to its high ideal” (pg. 10).
But in the end, even if it were successfully argued that institutions
and their academic employees do not engage in self-interested backend or
frontend quality manipulation – an argument that in fact favours PSA - and the
HEI model were to introduce all the quality insurance and assurance mechanisms
suggested by the PSA model, universities and colleges would still remain
redundant middlemen, adding questionable merit and plenty of deficit to the
system, including inadequate access to the HE system.
Access
Also said of the legal profession today, Corfield (2003) reports
concerns about an oversupply of lawyers in 18th century England and
how professionalization was used to help control the numbers. Though this might
be true of lawyers, there is no such worry with respect to academics. In fact,
the opposite is true.
Operating as a middleman for access to HE, HEIs decide which
and how many academics to hire, while they decide which and how many students
to admit. But because the HEI model is expensive to maintain and expand it has
built-in capacity limitations. The consequence is an appalling lack of employment
and education access for academics and students. The HEI model in use by developing
and developed systems around the world cannot supply enough academics to meet
either the societal or student demand for HE. This is true, even though HEIs
have increasingly relied on exploited precarious academic labour. This is not
to say that there are not enough qualified academics available to meet the
demand – in fact, there are. What is lacking in the HEI model is the funds to
pay for their salaries and the facilities that support them in the delivery of
their expert education services.
Take California as an example. Once the envy of public HE
systems around the world, for the past decade hundreds of thousands of eligible
Californian students have not been able to access HE in their state (California
State Legislature, 2013). At the same time, this has not stopped public HEIs
from recruiting international and out-of-state students, who are not eligible
for the state tax subsidy and must pay the full cost of their education. With persistent
cuts in public funding and rising operational costs, out-of-state and
international students are now a desperately needed source of revenue for HEIs
– which creates yet further conflicts of interest and questions of quality.
At the same time, to reduce operational overhead HEIs have
taken to offering short-term and part-time employment contracts to academics,
which because of the regulatory authority granted to universities and colleges
under the HEI model, they have little choice but to accept if they want to
pursue a career in academia. These contracts leave up to 70% of the academic
labour force without benefits, pensions, long-term security, or even a decent
wage, requiring many to take multiple contracts at different HEIs or supplemental
employment outside of HE just to make ends meet.
Moving east, at the moment in China HEIs
conditionally hire multiple academics for one position which they are expected
to compete for over a period of several years with the victor securing a job that
is among the lowest paid in the world (Altbach et. al., 2012), while the
defeated are tossed on the heap of unemployed academics. Meanwhile, Chinese students
compete all through their elementary and secondary education to score well on
national exams that determine their access to an insufficient number of spots
in HEIs, the vast majority of which receive a fraction of the public funding awarded
each year by the government to a designated handful of flagship institutions.
Similar stories are repeated across the globe wherever the
HEI model is in use.
While HEIs form a bottleneck in access to HE, PSA smashes the bottle wide open. It primarily accomplishes this by replacing the HEI regulatory apparatus with that of the professions. Individual academics are professionally licensed to offer their expert HE services, in private practice, as many as or even more than the system demands. This expands HE access for academics and students, both of whom have a right to it (see here and here).
We could live with the grievance that there were too many
academics providing HE services, compared to the reality that there are far too
few. If the access bottleneck for the HEI model is formed by insufficient
funding, then PSA can ameliorate this problem by substantially reducing costs,
while at the same time it improves the material conditions of academic service
providers and either reduces or eliminates student HE expenses.
Cost and Compensation
In the second post of this series, figures were supplied to substantiate the claim that
professional private academic practice is financially viable for as little as
one-quarter the HEI model cost of HE provision. If lawyers, dentists, doctors,
engineers, and other professionals can provide their equally valued services
under protection and direction of the professional model, so can academics. If there
is doubt, then I invite you to create a business prospectus for your particular
field of education expertise. Here is a prospectus for my subject of
philosophy:
|
Monthly |
Item |
|
$10,000 |
Salary of academic
practitioner (gross) |
|
$3200 |
Other
salaries and commissions (teaching assistant) |
|
$2000 |
Rent (office and lecture services,
facilities, and equipment) |
|
$200 |
Advertising |
|
$100 |
Printing and shipping |
|
$200 |
Office
supplies and equipment (computer, phone, business cards, etc.) |
|
$200 |
Website hosting,
maintenance, internet fees |
|
$50 |
General
business insurance |
|
$150 |
Health insurance |
|
$200 |
Retirement |
|
$500 |
PSA membership and other
professional fees (accountant, professional development courses, etc.) |
|
$16,800 |
Total |
Table 1: One example of monthly practice expenses.
Practice expenses are based on professional prerogative and so in
reality will display considerable variance. These numbers - $16,800/month or
$201,600/annum - are for a solo practice established one block from the
University of Toronto, Canada, with office assistance and facilities,
face-to-face teaching venue, and a teaching assistant working 20 hours a week
at $40/hour. These calculations do not include the introduction of government-sponsored
business incentives, subsidies, tax breaks, and research grants that mitigate practice
operational costs in a system that has converted to the PSA model.
|
Full Time
Equivalents |
Student Ratio |
|
|
Faculty (FTEF) |
680,510 |
15.5 |
|
Graduate Assistants (FTEGA) |
98,599 |
107.2 |
|
Other Staff (FTEOS) |
1,162,004 |
9.1 |
|
Students (FTES) |
10,565,751 |
N/A |
Table 2: FTEF entails instruction, research and public service.
All graduate assistants are considered part time. Figures are for 2 and 4-year
public HEIs combined. Source: Snyder, et al., 2019, pg. 262 and 283.
With respect to what lawyers call, client load, in 2019 the full-time
equivalent (FTE) academic to student ratio was roughly 1:16 in the American
public HE system. Assuming an FTE student enrols in five full-credit or 10 half-credit
courses during an academic year (8 months), this hypothetical practice needs to
service 80 students per year. If the load is evenly distributed, the practice might
offer 4 year-long courses with enrolments of 20 each or 8 half-year courses
with enrolments of 10 each. By the lights of most institutions and levels of
academic employment, this is a very reasonable student load.
According to this practice prospectus, each FTE student would need to
generate $12,500 in revenue. Based on 2019 data provided in post two of this
series and here, HEI revenue from
Appropriations and Non-operating Grants alone is $10,523 per FTE student, while
Instructional expense is $10,832. This American financial data is comparable to
systems around the world that have adopted the HEI model and clearly
demonstrates that PSA has potential to solve the funding woes of HE, while it
provides reasonable working conditions and compensation for academics.
The promising effects of PSA on HE finances benefit not only
academics but students as well. According to the National Center for Education
Statistics (2021) in the US, the average in-state tuition, fees, room and board
for public 4-year HEIs was $20,598 and $10,950 at 2-year HEIs, in constant
2018-19 dollars. For the academic year 2021-22, average public 4-year in-state
tuition is $10,740 and $3,800 at 2-year in-district colleges (College Board,
2021). These student expenses are frequently covered by some form of aid or
loan, with student loan debt now estimated to be $1.7 trillion in America alone.
Along with improved access to academics and the quality of HE service
they are principally responsible for providing, the finances of PSA can realistically
and reliably make tuition-free HE possible at 2 and 4-year public HEIs. In
fact, with the level of cost reduction offered by PSA, expense-free HE (i.e.,
tuition, fees, room and board) is a real possibility. This is greater access to
academics at low to no private expense and with reliance on less rather than
more public funding.
By substantially reducing the cost of providing HE service, PSA reduces
system-wide reliance on vulnerable public and private funding. Government purse
strings have been tightened, sometimes because of changes in political views on
the value of HE, sometimes because of economic realities such as the 2008
market crash, while private funding relies on costly solicitation of alumni, philanthropists,
and corporate investors – all of which have proven to be capricious or
corruptive sources of financial support for this pilar of society.
With far greater responsiveness than the HEI model could hope to muster,
PSA access to HE can expand or contract according to market demand – or
community permission, as UC Berkely recently learned - while the system is better insulated from the
vicissitudes of public finance and global economics.
Conclusion
It is not a question of can: Can PSA supplant or supplement
the HEI model? The answer is a clear, yes. It is a question of should: Should the
professional model be implemented and what form should it take?
As alluded to, some say the professions are on their way out
and good riddance to them. But this is too hasty. True, to one degree or another, the
established professions have earned themselves a bad reputation. Coached in conflict
theory terminology, they have managed to secure for themselves service oligopolies
that deny new service providers licensure on spurious grounds such as inferior service,
gender, race, or creed, with the aim of increasing the domain of their service and
scale of their remuneration. They have generally and in specific cases failed
to punish, correct or compensate for licentiates whose practice has failed to
meet explicit professional standards or implicit societal expectations. As
such, their relationships with society and citizen continue to some extent to
be characterized as corruptively paradoxical. As Corfield (2003) says, “arguments
still continue as to how effectively the professional bodies carry out their
regulatory mission” (pg. 23).
Some of the means by which PSA aims to do better in its
professional oligopoly have been identified in this post, though a precise formulation
of the PSA model is not required at this stage of its development and defence. Akin
to the historical and contemporary iterations of the HEI model, Corfield (2003)
describes a fluidity to the historical emergence of the legal profession in
England that is apropos to PSA, saying, “It was by no means clear…how the
procedures of professional regulation would come about and which mechanisms
would be adopted. There was no one right answer to the question of how to
regulate the professions; and certainly no single route to establish an ethos
of professional responsibility to the lay public” (pg. 17).
But one thing is clear with respect to PSA: perfection is not
a necessary condition to recommend the model, only preference over the HEI
model – the lesser of two evils, if you like. More than that, not only is it
recommended to choose the lesser of two evils, but also not to condemn the sons
for the sins of their fathers.
In an enriching account of the bigoted oligopoly of the (American)
law profession, Roiphe (November, 2012) revives a defence of professionalism along
the lines that it provides “immigrants, minorities, women, and outsiders of all
sorts with an imagined route to citizenship. This rhetoric combined with the
partially open doors of the profession helped people to move from the periphery
to the center. …It also provided a way for women and minorities to translate
their experience on the periphery into a new vision for the…polity” (pg. 33).
As sociologists and historians chronicle the corruptive
paradoxes of the professions, such talk is considered naïve, to say the least. But
as Roiphe (November, 2012) says,
It is…important to retain some
version of the professional ideal because it has been and can be useful. But we
must also remain thoughtful and critical about it at the same time. We ought to
work to preserve the useful purposes of professionalism while shedding the
antiquated and destructive ones. It is worth building on and developing the
profession in light of its (good) ideals and revisiting and discarding the
relics of its more destructive purposes. By exploring the role that
professionalism has played, we are better equipped to preserve and perpetuate
the good things about it, while discarding its outdated or destructive
elements. (pg. 36)
Though the foil for Roiphe’s article is a single early 20th
century Jewish attorney, Julius Henry Cohen, she also discusses others in the
periphery of mainstream society and their systemic exclusion from the practice
of law. At the same time, she could just as easily have been discussing HE and
the HEI model. Jewish people, people of color, women, and others have been and
continue to be denied equal access to education and employment within the HEI
model. The HEI model is no more immune to bigotry than the legal or other professions,
though all presumably aspire to move toward its mitigation and eventual elimination.
Tuned to the case of professional academics and the intentions of PSA, Roiphe
(November, 2012) offers counsel in this direction.
Without grasping onto outdated
entry requirements and rules that create unfair monopolies, [academics] should
try to define core skills and values that form the essence of the profession
and preserve those values as the profession goes through what seem like fairly
convulsive changes. One of those values is the coherence of the profession, the
notion that [academics] engaged in all different sorts of work share a common
pursuit - that they all in some way seek to improve their community - whether
it is local, national, international, or even virtual. (pg.39)
In closing, two quick final points should be made. First, it
might be said that the fourth industrial revolution makes moot any discussion
of preference for the HEI or PSA models, by democratizing, unbundling, and virtualizing
the provision of HE. To try and end this already lengthy post, readers are invited
to consider PSA responses to such heralded and purportedly inevitable technological
developments: here,
here, here,
and here -
with the general observation being that if and when the now vague promises of
the metaverse become commonplace reality, because not all courses of study are
the same in quality, there will still be need for standards – and presumably (or
is it, hopefully?) humans (in professional society) will still play a role in setting
and regulating them.
Second, there might be some doubt as to whether academics in
professional private practice could do all the work that employed academics do
in the HEI model. Aside from the favorable business prospectus and finances of PSA,
this blog has considered the full scope of academic work and concluded that the
professional model is viable organization of such work.
This post does not identify and defend all of the benefits
that PSA offers the interested parties, though throughout this text links have
been provided to blog posts that do. As always, I seek comment and
collaboration, but also, as this post was unusually long, I thank you for your
time and interest in this project, which I feel professional and moral obligation
to pursue.
References
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A Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts. Routledge.
California State Legislature. 2013. No. 520. (SB520) Sec. 64939.
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Overview of the Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Professions. Interdisciplinary
Description of Complex Systems 19(1), 80-93.
Cobban, A. R. (Spring 1985). Elective Salaried
Lectureships in the Universities of Southern Europe in the Pre-Reformation
Era. Bulletin
of the John Rylands Library of Manchester. Vol. 67.2: pp. 662-687.
Corfield, P. J. (2003). Eighteenth-Century Lawyers and the Advent
of the Professional Ethos. In, P. Chassaigne and J-P. Genet (eds), Droit et
société en France et Grande Bretagne: Law and Society in France and England.
Sorbonne Publications, Paris, pp. 103-26.
Greenwood, E. (1957) Attributes of a Profession. Social Work
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Haskins, C H. (1923). The Rise of Universities. New York:
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Ma, Jennifer and Matea Pender. (2021). Trends in College Pricing
and Student Aid 2021. New York: College Board. Pg. 3.
Merton, R. (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure, Revised
and Enlarged. London: The Free Press of Glencoe.
Riophe, R. (November 2012). A History of Professionalism: Julius
Henry Cohen and the Professions as a Route to Citizenship. Fordham Urban Law
Journal Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp. 33-74.
Snyder, T. D., de Brey, C., Dillow,
S.A. (2019). Digest of education statistics 2017
(NCES 2018-070). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.
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