PSA Amplifies the Positive Impact of Higher Education on Students

A couple of years ago, Inside Higher Education published a piece on how college transforms students. The author, Steven Mintz, is an historian who opens with reference to how industrialization enabled women to blend traditional affairs in domestic life and cottage industry with work outside the home in factories, adding to the bargain another task master in the form of capitalist bosses. Being in the company of sisters for twelve-plus hours a day earning under an overlord who is not one’s blood or a blue blood enabled women to share, organize, speak up, withhold, refuse, and other flexing that pushes back against exploitation and pushes forward to emancipation.

In this mix of home, cottage and factory, things like productive forces, personal wealth, political authority, and personal autonomy went through complex changes for women and society. His factory-work emancipation is a rich reference, akin to that found in the migration of Blacks to the factories of New England during the 20^th century.

We can add to the tapestry of these changing times, the universities and colleges that produce opportunities for earning and learning in a place and space often likened to a factory. Even with all the resources spent on trying to localize and levitate their place and space, and after spending over twenty-five years of my life earning and learning inside these institutions, when I think of a university or college the first image is of a place, a where, not a who or a whom, but a edifice with its employee and enrollee, not you, me, or we. I wonder, when late-Victorian women thought of the opportunities factories presented, were images of sisters the first to flash through their minds or was it the horrid buildings, exploitive employment and tyrannical bosses? Was the first and lasting thought of employees or of employers, when north-migrating Blacks strove to control their futures by earning and learning in factories, of all sorts?

This post explores how access to these institutions and the positive impact of higher education that they provide to people is aided or better facilitated by the Professional Society of Academics (PSA).

Being fortunate enough to gain access to the higher education provided by colleges or universities, what do students get out of their labours in such factories? According to Mintz’s review of the research, college has an impact “on students’ identity and self-concept and their values, attitudes and beliefs. Given profound shifts in student demographics, the earlier [research focuses] on full-time, traditional-aged, residential students, largely at selective four-year institutions, makes the generalizability of the authors’ conclusions open to question. Still, their findings are highly suggestive.”

1. […] college influences [students’] attitudes toward race, diversity, gender, sex and religion, as well as their psychosocial development, contributing to growth in students’ confidence and self-esteem.
2. […] …not only were graduates able to write, speak and calculate better than nongraduates, but their ability to reason was more sophisticated, their interest in the arts and culture was greater, they [were] more engaged in civic affairs and were more tolerant, open-minded and self-aware.
3. College’s impact hinges largely on the level of student engagement: the time and effort devoted to studying, the frequency and quality of interactions with faculty, peers and professional staff and the extent to which students take advantage of extracurricular activities.
4. […] most institutions failed to do much to accommodate differences in students’ interests or talents or to offer personalized or customized support services.
5. College is as much a social as an academic experience and interactions with peers and professors alter students’ attitudes and values, usually in a more liberal and tolerant direction, and socialize undergraduates in certain ideas, beliefs and outlooks.
6. At least among selective institutions, the traditional indicators of quality, such as admissions selectivity, institutional size, financial resources, reputation or even student-faculty ratio make much less difference than the quality of interaction with faculty and classmates and the level of participation in nonacademic and extracurricular activities (with the notable exception of fraternity membership, which has a negative impact on academic engagement and attitudes toward diversity).

Though not an exhaustive inventory, the first two findings identify developmental opportunities that higher education is meant to provide, which is not the same as saying, that a higher education institution is meant to provide. A college is not higher education. Colleges and universities are tools, like chalkboards or course registration and learning management software. They are factories for higher education with faculty employees on the production line – and this does not misunderstand the nature of the institutional universitas we have inherited and assume without challenge.

To avoid dubious splicing of the distinct concepts, “college” and “education,” the question before us might be better phrased:

(i) What do students get out of the higher education they access through universities and colleges?

This distinction leverages questions that could not be asked before PSA, like:

(ii) Are universities and colleges the best means to facilitate higher education service and stewardship among students, academics, and society?

This is different from asking how best to improve the institutions that students are required to use when pursuing higher education in the institutional inheritance. After centuries of assumption, questions about higher education are now questions about universities and colleges because these institutions are the only means by which students can access higher education for credentials, raising further novel questions like:

(iii) Can academics better service students as independent licensed professionals or as faculty employees of a university or college?

Leaning into the “college experience” motif with its mix of intellectual, psychological, axiological, and sociological metrics, the four findings that remain render to a triplet of quality engagement, diversity, and sociality. Accordingly, any model is legitimate that facilitates this sort of impactful experience at least as well as the heritage of factories that produce this data. The Professional Society of Academics is such a model, at least as good, likely better, certainly competitive, but also complementary to the institutions of the inheritance.

Before this claim is demonstrated using the findings, lets’ look at what the research says should be done to maintain or build upon the environments and relationships that impact students pursuing higher education (as enrollees and employees of factories). Mintz tells us,

Institutions that are seriously committed to providing their students with an impactful college experience that is developmental and transformative should do more to ensure that:

1.       Their students are actively engaged in the school’s academic and social life. That will certainly require devoting more money to financial aid to allow student to devote more time to their studies and co-curricular and extracurricular activities.

2.       Their faculty take teaching and mentoring seriously. Campuses must do more to hire faculty who are firmly committed to teaching and mentoring, support instructors to implement more engaging pedagogies and incentivize faculty interaction with students outside as well as inside the classroom.

3.       Students interact more with peers who share their values and aspirations. Participation in an affinity group or a learning community organized around a theme or shared interest can provide students with the support and affirmation they need to succeed.

4.       Their curriculum is truly balanced and includes training in academic success skills and a rich liberal arts core. A well-rounded curriculum will give students the skills and background knowledge that they need to succeed in upper-division courses as well as the range of literacies that will help them become mature, sophisticated adults.

5.       Their student life initiatives support and reinforce their academic offerings. Student support services and co-curricular and extracurricular offerings should complement the campuses’ academic courses. Undergraduates, irrespective of their age, identity and background, are undergoing wrenching transformations, and campuses need to do more to support them as they undergo these transitions.

6.       Their students feel that they belong and are valued as individuals. Students who feel a sense of connection to their instructors, classmates and the institution are much more likely to make the investment in time and focus that academic success requires. [Bold throughout is original.]

This hexagonal how-to can be restated in a laughable symmetry: Give us more money and time so we can better incentivize faculty employees to properly service and steward students who study and transform together as faculty and students successfully engage a well-balanced curriculum of skills, knowledge and literacies that complement and support students in their extra-curricular activities, thereby providing an affirmative feeling of belonging and a sense that college is worth the investment of money and time.

This is the PSA version of how-to: Give us less money and more independent time together so academics and students can better support and incentivize each other to earn and learn in environments not limited by legislated institutional employer-enrollers, thereby subordinating or eliminating middleman institutions so that students and academics feel their distinct investment of money and time in personal higher education pursuits are validated from without the inheritance of universities and colleges (that they disclaim).

It might be said I miss the point of the article. Mintz covers going to college or university and the higher education offered by these institutions, so what does an alternative model like PSA have to do with the impact of these institutions on people and society?

This is true, but uninteresting and unhelpful in exploring solutions to the many serious shortcomings that people who depend upon higher education must suffer thanks to assumption of the institutional inheritance that I disclaim and challenge with an alternative. The fulcrum of this discussion should be and is for me the nature of the impact of higher education, not the impact of assumed, unnecessary, inferior, monopolistic institutional facilitators of higher education (with credentials).

The terms “college education” and “higher education” have become interchangeable in most uses, but I repeat, these terms are not synonyms like “higher,” “tertiary” and “post-secondary” education. The concept “higher education” covers a wide range of education, including higher education degrees that are by law made exclusive to colleges and universities, though the education behind the credentials is not, should not, and cannot be made exclusive by law.

These institutions are not identical to the social good but merely instruments that offer one version of provision and protection. One can ask what education, research and community service is found in a college, as Mintz does in his review of the research, but sensibly and productively ask if that higher education might happen in another space, in a different model that maintains and improves upon some of the familiar institutional functions and functionaries but does not require monopolistic college or university employer-enrollers for service and stewardship of the social good. The fact that PSA exists and is being used here to demonstrate with greater specificity its use in ensuring the positive impact of higher education on students (and academics), is proof enough that no logical identity exists between “higher education” and “college” or “university,” .

These findings cover the development of people who are students in relationships shaped by a legislated institutional employer-enroller with deep cultural roots in a wider social contract apparatus that includes legally enforced accreditation and degree-granting status – what we can call, credentialed higher education (service and stewardship). In his summary, Mintz primarily points to the impact college has on the development of skills, dispositions, attitudes, values, beliefs, character, and socialization in students.

(iv) How might such impact data look in a society where for centuries the inheritance operates with its institutional employer-enrollers but also where there is a model for the development of students (and academics) outside the institutions in a professional environment of independent credentialed higher education earning and learning?

(v) Would such a model better facilitate the essential frontline higher education relationships that demand quality engagement, intimacy, trust, commitment, integrity, knowledge of self, other, and the rest to achieve the desired personal and public impact of higher education (not institutions)?

(vi) Compare how students access frontline relationships with academics and their assistants through factory employers or professional practices to ask who does more to ensure that the positive impact of higher education is attainable, sustainable and optimal, the (unionized) factory employee or the (licensed) independent practitioner?

The first thing Mintz identifies from the research is the need for more public money to ensure more private time for studies and extra-curriculars. At the same time, universities and colleges set minimum enrollment requirements that if not met result in cancelation of courses. Using minimum enrollment as an indicator of the break even point, if in its service and stewardship to society an institution enrols seven students in a course that requires ten enrollees, then this earning and learning opportunity is lost to the academic(s) and the student(s) involved because the inheritance cannot finance that sort of intimate, affective higher education for people and society.

This might seem a reasonable limitation faced by any model that aims to service and steward mass credentialed higher education. But a pinch-point in access caused by minimum course enrollments is something better managed by individuals, not institutions. Consider my own experience as illustration.

I’ve studied with thousands of university students, helping them to attain a course credit in professional ethics, philosophy of mind, literary analysis, or some such learning, while earning as an institutional employee maybe $4000 or $5000 for a semester-long credit course that has thirty, forty, fifty students or more enrolled. Suppose that students pay tuition of $500 for a year-long course and seven students enroll in a course offering (that happens to be offered in this institution, this year, by this instructor, at this time and place). This is not sustainable for an institution with a break-even of ten enrollees or $5000 in tuition. As faculty employees, many of us have faced the reality of spending scads of time in course development only to be followed by no time in delivery because the course is cancelled (for financial reasons).

Fair enough and that’s the end of it for inherited finances. But suppose I or some other academics (even faculty employees) find these circumstances acceptable and are happy to study professional ethics with seven students while earning $3500 in the bargain. Unfortunately, supposing is all we can do. The reality is we eight can’t study together for credit toward a degree, not on the public dime and institutional employer’s time or using public college and university facilities.

As the academic who develops and delivers, if the course is cancelled by the institution, then I lose employment, lines on my CV, earnings, and experience teaching, while students lose learning and progress toward credential goals. As an individual, it’s do no work and get nothing or do some work and get $3500. Admittedly, I don’t find such a scenario appealing at this point in my life, measuring the wants and needs around me. Something in the $800-$1000 range per course would be more acceptable, with not a minimum, but a maximum enrolment of ten (as determined by exercise of my professional prerogative in licensed independent academic practice).

 https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/highlights

In PSA, minimum enrolment or the break-even point, would vary considerably across professional higher education practices. If I took these seven students on to my academic practice at my preferred compensation rate, I’d earn $5600-$7000 in joint study of Wittgenstein over the academic year. If I took on another five sections, for fifteen hours of class time in the week and a total enrollment of fifty students, then I’d earn $40,000 to $50,000, with three or four months off to relax or to take on more work as an independent professional servicing and stewarding the higher education aspirations of people through my solo academic practice.

But, the objection goes, it seems quite a stretch to suggest that these cancelled courses could be put on by you, on your own, since not even the institutions can sustainably provide service and stewardship for the absurdly low tuition of $500-$1000 per course with no further public or private monies required. After all, the going rate is $400 to $1000 per credit hour, not course.

In a non-financial respect, this objection succeeds thanks to legislated barriers that leave academics and students to the mercy of monopolistic institutional accreditation and degree-granting status, if they seek to earn and learn with the credentials of higher education. But obviously this begs the question. Legislated exclusivity of higher education credentials is based on an assumed institutional model that I disclaim and PSA challenges. So, there is nothing to be conceded in acknowledging this historical accident of institutional over individual legitimacy, because PSA ignores the institutions and operates on its own professional version of legitimacy for higher education credentials like a course credit toward a Bachelor of Arts degree.

https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/highlights

But continuing, suppose a professional model like PSA was in place that enabled me and students access to one another to study for credit independently of inherited (legal) notions of institutional accreditation and degree-granting status.

(vii) Is practice revenue of $35,000 from five courses of seven enrollees each enough to cover my classroom rentals at the institution where the rooms are empty because the course is cancelled (or not offered, or offered at a bad time, or offered for too much tuition, or offered by lousy faculty)?

In considering this question, include the fact that down time for campus facilities can accommodate independent academic practices that feed a long-established revenue stream from renting publicly founded and funded facilities, helping to improve the bottom line for institutions that are desperately in need of facilities maintenance and repair across the inheritance.

(viii) What other expenses might I incur when earning $50,000 to $100,000 servicing and stewarding the more common teaching load of one-hundred students over an academic or calendar year?

(ix) Would I need a teaching or research assistant?

(x) How about a secure place to keep records of our higher education study together?

(xi) In my independent professionally licensed and supported academic practice, would my break-even have to cover the expense of a dean, chair, academic vice-president, payroll director, office assistant, football coach, labour union, or police department?

PSA can fill gaps in the institutional reach of higher education earning and learning. With a professional model like PSA in place, students and academics can form relationships on our own, using our own design and time, and for far less than the inheritance charges society for the higher education it is not identical to but merely facilitates. The tuition fee revenue figures that I have used here are a fraction of the total funding that universities and colleges demand from public and private pockets to function, while constantly crying poor, and often from confrontational picket lines.

This argumentation alone ought to provide enough reason to give PSA a closer look, but still further features are designed to ensure a positive impact from and on higher education. Consider the second action that, according to Mintz, research says institutional employers should take to better ensure positive impact: get faculty employees to do their job (better).

PSA can compensate for the earning and learning shortcomings of universities and colleges, while academics (who might be, are, or have been faculty employees) of all stripes earn on the fringe in expanded (professional) access to credentialed higher education (offered at a fraction of the institutional price tag and interference in the frontline academic-student relationship).

(xii) In this context, what incentivizes academics to take seriously their social contract obligation to engage and support students across a complex of development metrics like those that Mintz highlights?

There is much about PSA that motivates academics and students to work together to (better) achieve the positive impact of higher education.

(xiii) For instance, what sort of impact on the quality and quantity of higher education might there be from PSA-style objective marking of all student work that contributes to final grades, combined with extensive data collection on the performance of all frontline academic practices and the students they service, made available to the public with analytic tools for investigation?

Detailed explanation of such public objectivity in higher education service and stewardship is available throughout this blog, but think of an education relationship where academics know the students who enroll in their courses because academics admit them, choose to teach them, personally take them on, rather than academics ending up in a room with the students who manage to pass through the veil of institutional admissions (tailored by the constant need for increased revenue just to break even).

Attorneys, physicians, psychiatrists, personal trainers, life coaches, and others take on clients as PSA suggests academics take on students for teaching, colleagues for researching, and communities for servicing and stewarding. In a model requiring all student work that contributes to final grades be marked objectively and that all information on students and academics affecting the social good be openly available to society, the success and failure of frontline education relationships becomes a concern of mutual interest to master and scholar.

(xiv) Beyond the four, five, seven, whatever-thousand in compensation for developing and (hopefully) delivering the credit course, what incentive is there for me to ensure that college has a positive impact on the thirty, forty, or one-hundred and forty students enrolled in my Introduction to Philosophy course (or is it the institution’s course, because it’s de facto their calendar, office and classroom, while we are their employees and enrollees)?

(xv) Is earning as a faculty employee a calling with no further (material, sustainable) incentive needed to service and steward society?

(xvi) If a failing grade is submitted for a course, what happens to the student and what happens to the academic?

(xvii) Does the academic get paid less or fired or not hired again (by the institution or the student)?

(xviii) Does the student have recourse to complain about the teaching and support they received (from the faculty employee or the independent practitioner)?

(xix) Can the student ask for a full refund or prorated return of tuition (from the college enroller or the practice enroller)?

(xx) Is there an option for the student to choose a different academic from whom to receive instruction?

(xxi) Is there an option for the academic to choose a different student to receive instruction?

(xxii) Would this sort of mutual selectivity on the frontline of higher education better incentivize academics (and students) to “take teaching and mentoring seriously”?

In a professional model like PSA, when a student passes or fails a course, they do so after an objective marking process for courses and programs that are assessed for ranking on various metrics by academic peers and where academic-student relationship outcomes are publicly accessible (for use by other students and the wider society).

(xxiii) In whatever working form this might take, how would such objective, peer-based professional evaluation, assessment and publicity affect incentives for both academics and students (to do their jobs better)?

(xxiv) If evaluation of the performance of both is objective and public, would academics have incentive to choose the student(s) with whom success is more likely, while students are incentivized to do the same in choosing the academics from whom to receive instruction?

(xxv) If 60% of students fail my courses using PSA-style objective evaluation and assessment, then who is responsible for the failure and who suffers the consequences?

(xxvi) If the failure rate is consistently in the twenty percent range in courses where the content and examination materials are assessed by academic peers to rank an 8.5 out of 10 on a course difficulty scale, would such information be useful in pairing courses, academics and students with mutually reinforcing incentives to succeed?

Consider incentivization and higher education in a model where failure (and success) is the product of an objectively observable, mutual-interest relationship among academics and students, where everyone knows more precisely the what and who of the failure (and success), so that with such information students can improve their chances of finding an academic (or two or three in their community) who can help them pass a required course on Kant (that has an 8.5 CDS score or better to meet the requirements of certain graduate study programs), and compare this model to the monopolistic institutional employer-enroller arrangement that we have inherited.

(xxvii) Which offers more fertile ground to develop better incentives that are sustainable and symbiotic with the interests of both parties, in the absence of unnecessary, interfering third-party interests like those of a university or college?

So far, the research tells us to get more money, more time and more reason to do our jobs – how enlightening. But let’s continue. We can lump together three, five and six for joint treatment after we look at the fourth item that Mintz found institutions should do more to ensure: use of curricula that helps students become mature, sophisticated adults.

Recognizing the limited conception this invites of those who pursue higher education, this recipe of skills, knowledge and literacies comes out differently when prepared to the tastes of different academics and students, at different stages of their lives. In comparison, it strains reason to claim that the positive developmental impact of higher education is more likely to be optimally reached, sustained and stewarded in the faculty employment of institutions than in the independent practices of an actual academic profession.

Universities and colleges proudly broadcast how their service and stewardship is personal but public, campus but also industry-oriented, or some other such contrast in pillar and pylon. But the best developmental education I received was not in the institution, though it was from the institution. Upon entering university, I was lucky to find two faculty employees, with whom I eventually co-designed PSA, Drs Peter March and Robert Ansel. There is no hope that the inheritance can match the sort of personal development these academics provided me. And this is true not only because the institutional employer-enrollers cancel courses that don’t meet minimum enrollment requirements thereby denying me access to higher education, they as frown upon Directed Reading courses constructed and conducted between myself and a faculty employee to compensate for the higher education shortcomings of the institutional inheritance.

The remaining how-to triplet points to a complementary web of peer and other support for personal transformations (at college). Going to university left me a changed person, but not thanks to a sense of belonging or campus comradery, as Mintz finds in the research. Before going to university, I did not care much for school or schoolmates but liked learning, or rather, liked knowing (or thinking I knew). Entering university a couple of years after my cohort, I kept the full-time job I had because I needed it to finance my higher education future.

During my undergrad studies, I conducted a weekly, two-hour tutorial in symbolic logic that typically had around 20 students. I received no payment from the institution or individuals for this service and stewardship. At the same time, some of my wants and needs were met like, exercising my love of studying, training to be a better teacher, meeting civic duties to help others, and helping Peter, who has done so much to help me, to help students in his logic classes.

But don’t be misled by this anecdotal evidence. It is not reason to think we should claim the inheritance without question, without challenge, without alternative. Happening upon Peter and Robert was lucky, as was finding them in a higher education institution, from a philosophical-historical point of view. The example of such proper academic relationships does not help the case for a positive personal and public higher education impact from institutions, nor do allusions to a college experience with its parfum of autonomy and access in a place and space that fits (some of) everyone.

(xxviii) What exactly does this context incentivize among academics who happen to be faculty employees who happen upon forty, fifty, or a hundred students in one of their symbolic logic courses?

If Peter was a licensed, independent, practicing academic of PSA – not an employee of an institution – and I was getting paid for tutoring his logic classes, then I would not have had to work full time at the local hospital and instead might have worked for my future in the academe. Consider that every year Peter had two logic sections to teach with at least fifty enrollees in each class. In PSA, at $1000 in course tuition per student, that’s $100,000 over the academic year, professionally serving and stewarding students with my weekly tutorial assistance of two hours (plus an hour prep).

(xxix) What would that sort of assistance be worth to an academic whose pass/fail data is objectively determined and made available to a public that includes students (and their families) who seek the positive impact of higher education from professional practices that they pay directly for service using their education tax dollars?

Peter and Robert went well beyond their faculty paychecks to educate me. That I charged no fee to assist Peter in teaching his logic students was the least I could do and anyway not a great burden to lift given that the failure of students is not the failure of institutions or faculty employees in the inheritance.

But in PSA things are different. Maybe Peter thinks $100 an hour is reasonable pay for 70-80 hours of teaching assistance from a competent wannabe professor. This would put a dent of $7000 to $8000 in his annual practice revenue of $100,000. Or maybe along comes an assistant who is quite competent and looking to take on additional academic or operations practice responsibilities to (better) assist, so Peter offers ten or fifteen percent of the revenue as compensation (over the period of the TA’s college studies or perhaps as the income for a new career choice in professional academic assistance, with no college study overlap). Or maybe society sets a minimum earning level for frontline teaching and research assistants across the sector, while academics and students in the professional model negotiate additional compensation or long-term co-working relationships that might become partnerships in professional academic practices. In all PSA-possible scenarios there is substantial reduction in levels of un(der)paid labour throughout the higher education to which we are subjected by universities and colleges.

Operating under proper, sustainable PSA incentives like those identified here, the recipe for positive impact on students is amplified beyond what inherited finances can reliably and competently accommodate, as the earning incentives that PSA offers reach well beyond the institutional paychecks won by faculty labour unions that stand with placards as collective representation for some individual faculty employees and some of their interests in some of the issues some of the time. If Peter practiced higher education as attorneys can legally and gainfully practice law, then he wouldn’t need a labour union like the one that's forced on faculty as a condition of employment at the institution where we met. PSA uses a different form of collective labour representation for the service and stewardship of higher education, the well-known and tested professional model.

Medicine and law often have transformative effects on people, from the practitioner and peers to the patient or client and the wider society, across a range of relationships. My ex-wife is an attorney. She has serviced and stewarded the same clients over many years, while others have a shorter turnover, with the same being true of colleagues including attorneys and support staff. Sometimes the clients are a family or other group and sometimes individuals. The social contract for law that is conducted inside the professional model has been functioning now for a tick over two centuries, while for nearly nine-hundred years the institutional inheritance has been the only game in town for higher education earning and learning.

(xxx) What if history was inverted, with higher education housed in the professional model while legal service and stewardship required institutional (law firm) employment to legally and gainfully contribute to the social good of law, would attorneys and academics be better incentivized to do their job well, so that positive social and personal impacts are optimized?

2019. Halifax, Nova Scotia Crown Prosecutors on strike.

Attorneys earn as employees and they earn self-employed in solo and partnered practices. The employed among these licensed professionals sometimes find themselves on picket lines, fighting the good fight against a public or private employer, in solidarity with their apparent counterparts in faculty employment, sometimes with both the attorney in solo practice and the academic in faculty employment being instantiated in the same individual. These days my ex-wife is a crown prosecutor and so a public employee who might one day find herself on such a picket line during cold Canadian winters, certainly her fellow government employees at the universities and colleges in Halifax stand on sidewalks with placards and Tim’s in hand, as do those who find themselves in the attorney-academic crossover, like those in the faculty union at McGill University School of Law – who blocked me on X for probing them with PSA.

2022. United Kingdom Criminal Barristers on strike.

When thinking of the impact that higher education can have on people, traditionally shaped as it is by a monopolistic model of institutional employer-enrollers that peddle valued credentials, also think of this: In law and medical school, students receive mandatory instruction in the theory and practice of professional ethics and conduct, including best practices in servicing and stewarding relationships with the public, peers, patients, or clients throughout their careers and that this sort of professional care does not happen with graduate students who (aim to) become faculty employees, or if it does, then it’s not much more than an add-on to the institutional higher education app assumed by all.

But there’s a notable difference in being an attorney and being an academic that helps make PSA work: No matter how well either meets the explicit and implicit professional relationship standards in their respective social contracts, only the attorney earns under threat of losing the (licensed) privilege to legally and gainfully practice law should those standards fail to be met, while academics move on to the next university or college for employment or are so well protected by a labour union at their current institution that their (tenured) employment is not threated by substandard or failed relationships with students and peers.

(xxxi) How might this sort of professional no-license-no-lettuce better ensure positive impact on all those who depend upon higher education?

But Mintz isn’t done yet with summation of the literature. He has another list of six. This one describes what he calls the “ideas, concepts, values and modes of thought” that help define what it is to get higher education from institutions of the inheritance.

1. Critical consciousness: Critical thinking is not merely a matter of interpretation, analysis and evaluation; it’s also about skepticism and calling into question received opinions, the conventional wisdom and what’s often deemed common sense.
2. Linguistics and semantics: It’s in college that many young people first encounter and acquire a new vocabulary. This is a language that psychologizes and medicalizes behavior and motivations, a terminology that describes and labels emotions and interpersonal relationships and, as we are increasingly aware of today, a vocabulary that articulates identity, power dynamics, injury, trauma, impairment, harm and maltreatment.
3. Secularism: Apart from religious colleges, the academy is largely indifferent to religion and to religious doctrines and practice and spiritual concerns and has instead adopted a largely unacknowledged secular belief system and vocabulary. In general, college appears to contribute to a decline in religiosity.
4. Liberalism: By this, I simply mean exposure to a political and moral philosophy that emphasizes individual rights and personal freedom and that stresses the value of diversity and openness to new ideas. In many instances, it also entails an introduction to a liberal interpretation of U.S. history, with its emphasis on the positive value of government, labor unions and immigration, sensitivity toward the costs of the nation’s economic growth, territorial expansion and foreign entanglements, and its depiction of the country’s history as an ongoing struggle against entrenched economic interests and advocates of illiberal values.
5. Academic discourse: Undergraduates acquire some level of familiarity, even fluency, with concepts associated with postmodernism and social justice thinking, such as the fluidity of gender and sexual identities, intersectionality, and the indeterminacy of absolute truth.
6. Negativism: Although most college students are optimistic about their personal future, about half express pessimism about the world’s future, and a slim majority are pessimistic about whether there will be significant progress in combating climate change, poverty or political polarization (though a majority do believe there will be progress combating racism and other forms of bigotry). [Bold is added.]

And there you have it, the 666 on what students get out of going to college for their higher education development (and credentials). With the review in hand, Mintz feels comfortable enough to elaborate,

The most significant divide in American society today is between the college educated and non–college graduates. These two groups increasingly inhabit two separate cultures, one more cosmopolitan, worldly and, yes, more sophisticated than the other. A college education does indeed fuel this country’s cultural divide, and there is a real danger that as the culture of the university increasingly differs from the culture at large, political strains will intensify and boil over.

If the social good stays sequestered in the cultural and legal apparatus of the inherited institutional model, then maybe we should heed this warning. But maybe, as people live longer, post-secondary education becomes the next universal stage of personal and civic development. Laws that set minimum mandatory schooling for citizens might be extended to some college or university level of education (after which one moves on to the career stage of the extended life cycle). Students are adults in colleges and universities, but they are in development, as Mintz correctly reports, and a development that in some societies is lifelong with the value of education not so strictly pinned to vocational outcomes.

The rub is that finances of the inheritance simply can not allow for this sort of expansion in mandatory (higher) education on any sustainable basis necessary for this sort of social metamorphosis in earning and learning among academics and students. The institutional model is collapsing under the weight of its costs, be they pecuniary or principled.

I’ve contacted Mintz over at Inside Higher Education, responding to other of his articles. I have received no reply and so I will not contact him on this article, which ends on a note I have hit many times in trying to demonstrate how an alternative universitas like PSA kicks the living shit out of a university or college. He says,

But that doesn’t mean that the academy should respond by downplaying its commitment to critical thinking or cultural criticism. Colleges and universities must remain true to their guiding star, which is to subject all ideas to analysis and critique and to remain society’s arena for unfettered discussion, deliberation and debate.

So, society is doomed by a college-no-college divide, but nonetheless we should stay the course with an exclusive, assumed, limited, unnecessary, underfunded, model of institutional employment and enrollment for service and stewardship of higher education earning and learning. A similar oddity is found across the first two lists-of-six covering the what and the how of positive impact on students. Apparently, the research claims college graduate reasoning is more sophisticated, their interest in the arts and culture is greater, they are more engaged in civic affairs and more tolerant, open-minded and self-aware, but to optimize these positive affects, more must be done to ensure that  students interact with peers who share their values and aspirations, with participation in affinity groups that can provide students with the support and affirmation they need to succeed. Does this ignore the effects echo of chamber on education? Surely there is tension in these findings. And don’t get me started on the majority of students who think their personal future will be fine, though half of these same students believe the future is fucked, though they are all getting the benefit of critical thinking, expanded lexicons, practice in academic discourse, and so on.

Maybe Mintz got some of the research wrong or maybe it wasn’t his aim to explore obvious tensions, if not out right contradictions, among the research findings. Fair enough. But always it is our obligation as academics to practice what we teach, to question, to not assume, to dine outside the comfort of affiliation networks, inviting new dishes to the menu, including those from chefs who shun traditional cuisine and offer alternative to the only menu we have ever known: the inheritance. The guiding star metaphor that Mintz uses is appropriate because it points to the destination called higher education rather than the only carrier we use to navigate the sea to higher education earning and learning: the USS Institution.

Enough has now been said that any academic looking to meet their social contract obligations can respond to these closing remarks from Mintz using PSA. But in conclusion, here’s some of my response in a nutshell.

To address a swelling social danger, it seems we must put more people into college or take more people out of college to mend and better meld. But this is a false dichotomy. The former strikes me as the (obvious) preference, for reasons we need not explore further than at present. But there might be a third way, a middle way between the two that is preferrable to the current state of college graduate vs non-graduate. PSA can help with this in two ways.

First, finances of the professional model shatter access barriers of the colleges and universities. Under PSA, access to higher education could actually be tuition and even expense-free. Though not the only barrier separating academics and students, the financial is significant, as student debt attests. Recall that PSA can enable academics to offer higher education service and stewardship to students for a thousand bucks a course, with no institutional middlemen. This expansion in access to higher education (credentials) is one way to close the cultural divide.

Another way is to change the presence of higher education, its place and space in a community. I don’t mean housing it in virtual environments like MOOCs so we can have free higher education for all and the rest of the hype that mistakes training for education. PSA was created thirty years ago, when there was no AI savior or punisher for higher education. It is a face-to-face model in real environments, where use of tech is decided by the academic faces and the student faces of the social good, not faceless institutional employer-enrollers and their government overseers. The professional model atomizes service and stewardship for higher education across a body of institution employed but also self-employed academics who are licensed and supported in independent practice with students and other academics, each earning or learning together, without the use of institutional middlemen. This can embed higher education throughout our communities, wherever academics and students feel like living, earning and learning, not just the campuses.

Expanding access to credentialed higher education earning and learning in this way means that the education (and research) relationships we form can vary from intimate one-on-one meetings at the cafe up the street from the Kwik-E-Mart to classes of ten or less or more working together, accessing genuine mutual interest in success from academics who publicize fabulous CDS scores and sparkling practice records, to help students select and pass a course with objective evaluation (though not preparation) and develop as people-citizens. Compare that to these survey results,

I will keep making the case for proper research and experimentation with something like the Professional Society of Academics. It’s kind of an amazing ride, interpreting universities and colleges and reinterpreting higher education through a professional lens. You’re welcome to join me at the microscope or the telescope.