PSA Wants That Nasty Mess at the Bottom of the Cone

Häagen-Dazs in a waffle cone is the ambrosia I need to undertake another comparison of Professional Society of Academics finances to those found in the higher education institution mode of production. The familiar heritage of universities and colleges forms a needless and thoughtless monopoly on earning and learning that I disclaim and defy using a mode of production that is superior on all measures, including dramatic reduction in the cost of the social good to students and society.

The money involved in American higher education is staggering, but comparable to other developed nations, and so the reasoning that follows is equally applicable to the UK, Canada, Australia, to all who use universities and colleges in facilitation of higher education. Across the United States in financial support of institutional employer-enroller modes of production we find:

i) tens of billions in research funding,

ii) hundreds of billions in appropriations,

iii) tens of billions in government oversight,

iv) hundreds of billions in student financial aid,

v) tens to hundreds of billions in opportunity costs,

vi) and more that counts as the real cost of an inheritance.

For argument’s sake we can assume that these moneys dance close to a trillion-dollar tune every year across public and private higher education, with spending in the sector totaling $702 billion in 2020-21, down from $719 billion the year before. This traditional higher education financial tune is composed of trillion dollar notes that measure the full score of university and college costs to students and society. Costs that include hundreds of billions in institutional debt carried by these legal persons, along with a growing backlog of capital renewal that exceeds two trillion dollars, all officially tallied in service and stewardship to people-citizens who are left to shoulder student debt that now hovers around the two trillion dollar mark. That's a lot of trill notes for an anthem that PSA can perform better in the billion dollar register.

But back to the ice cream metaphor. Complete with toppings, this cone comes at an unnecessarily exorbitant cost to students and society, when compared to a profession-based social contract that offers better higher education at a fraction of the cost, and without institutional masters or internet MOOCs.

For perspective on the peerless cost-cutting of PSA, a quick dip into student debt is illustrative. Inherited institutional costs have left students burdened with $1.777 trillion in debt. Only PSA does not see this as student debt. It is higher education debt. Or rather, it's a social good debt under the inherited, institutional model that everyone assumes without challenge. The viable and desirable PSA challenge has been on offer to students, academics, and societies for over a generation now and is magnitudes more economical to operate than institutional employer-enrollers that ratchet debt.

Universities and colleges force person-citizen-students without alternatives to shoulder production costs with net tuition, while continuing to cede trillions of their tax dollars to universities and colleges that demand evermore public money to feed the insatiable appetites of institutions. This is debt taken on by young people, as a kind of inheritance tax. But it is debt they can disclaim and challenge with an alternative profession-based model that others like the American Association of University Professors ought to have registered a century ago, but have instead blocked me on X for even suggesting they research. 

From the PSA perspective, so-called student debt is a consequence of the sole mode of production that the planet assumes and so the debt is a consequence, not of personal consumption choices, but of the failure of society to examine its institutions and in particular of academics to meet the terms of their higher education social contract and think outside the employment and enrollment boxes.

As such, it's likely we do not see higher education (finance) from the same perspective, though I invite you to sport some PSA headphones and enter the professional higher education odeum.

With only the institutional employer-enrollers for access, students have no choice but to order the whole ice cream cone, even if that means taking on an average of $38,000 of debt just to get a taste of that sweet social good. Though not everyone likes the institutional flavour and not everyone can afford to stand in line for a taste, it remains the only cone for sale by public or private vendors. So, stepping up to the window, I whisper, “How much for just the tip?”

With PSA added to the menu, there is another option, a healthier choice in earning and learning among academics and students, with greater flexibility in careers and credentials. This new professional flavour is far less expensive and serves small groups of one-on-one dining, suping seminars or those first-year Intro Course Buffets. Using only the public cost of federal student aid or the personal cost of net tuition, let’s see how PSA can operate solely on the apex finances of the institutional confection.

 

PSA Flavoured Ice Cream Cones

In 2023-24, student aid from all sources totaled $256.7 billion. The federal student aid package including grants, work-study, loans and such is projected to be $135 billion for FY 2025. This cost is included near the top of the cone, in the cream of it, alongside other main ingredients like appropriations or R & D funding. At the bottom of the cone, where the sticky mess flows, we find students who finance their higher education for around $333 a credit hour. Depending on the source, the actual in-state cost is somewhere between $368 and $491 averaged across 2-year and 4-year degree-granting institutions. But the numbers look prettier if we use a $333 figure, which gives us $1000 for a three-credit-hour semester course, with a first year of study clocking 24 credit hours or 8 semester courses for $8,000 in net tuition costs to you and me, to the person-citizen-student. 

This financial fiction of $333 for a credit-hour, $1000 for a three-credit-hour course, or $8,000 for annual tuition is the net cost of institutional higher education financed by students who are left with no choice but to accept the terms of an inherited social contract, supposing some university or college accepts them as a party to the contract. These figures can be seen as the smallest cost units used to argue for the financial superiority of PSA over the institutional assumption that binds and burdens us all.

In the fall of 2024,  there were 19.28 million undergraduate students in higher education, with a projected 19.57 million for 2025. Sixty-two percent of 2.99 million high school graduates in 2022 went on to post-secondary studies, with 16.9% attending 2-year and 45.1% attending 4-year institutions, 72.6% of which enrolled in public institutions.

So far, we have: 1) $135 billion in federal student aid; 2) $333 per credit hour; and 3) 1,350,360 million students who (in 2022) enter their first year of public higher education and the next chapter of their lives. But who will provide the higher education service and stewardship that students have a right to seek? The inheritance says, “My good man, why our long tradition of universities and colleges, of course,” while PSA shouts from the bottom of the cone, “Step aside institutional employer-enrollers! The professional universitas is here to serve!”

In America there are 1.5 million faculty employees working for all sorts of higher education institutions in all sorts of employment security and precarity. In demonstration of PSA's superior financial design, let’s suppose we are setting up the professional model and someone suggests an across-the-board income of $200,000 per annum for academics whose professionally licensed practices serve and steward students during their first year of studies. Sitting around the design table, this might sound crazy given that only the top tenured faculty receive this sort of salary. In 2023-24, across all public and private institutions the average salary for full-time faculty was $112,000, down from the pre-pandemic high of $120,000, while tenured, full professors earned an average of $155,000 and at the other end of the spectrum, part-time, adjunct, casual labour earned $3,900 for each standard course section they teach, when not standing in picket lines.

But we also know that federal student grants total $32.121 billion (2023-24) and it becomes clear that with PSA and just this public cost of the inheritance – a cost that students to not pay as part of net tuition – society could afford 160,605 academics attending to students in first-year of higher education that boasts a public system academic-student ratio of 8:1.

Appreciate just how far off this philosopher’s calculations would have to be for PSA to fail society as an inferior financial model to that of the institutions we all suffer without reprieve, without recourse. First-year higher education studies can be covered in PSA for around $32 billion, while, again, spending in the inheritance was $702 billion in 2020-21. Good luck arguing against that margin of error.

The critic might claim that, at best, PSA covers the cost of some of the higher education labour. As such, maybe a professional model can cover the cost of the (first-year, often adjunct) faculty teacher salary, but not the faculty researcher or community servicer, nor the teaching, research, office or other sorted assistance, nor does this drop in the finance bucket provide for dorms and forums, labs and lounges, offices and odea, nor the communities that come with curricula on campus.

But to maintain a grip on the PSA financial perspective, when such doubts enter your mind, recall that PSA can operate on only the bottom of the ice cream cone while universities and colleges consume the entire confection and complain it’s not enough as there remains at the bottom of the cone the sticky, annoying mess of net tuition which students are left to somehow finance as part of their inheritance. From this professional perspective, universities and colleges present absurd terms for earning and learning in higher education

I do not need a university or college employer to provide my serve and stewardship to students, except that these institutions hold the keys to value in higher education credentials: state-legislated degree-granting status, without which academics cannot earn and so students cannot learn independently of an inherited institutional monopoly. I am not alone in this ability-slash-inability and PSA is a corrective for this absurdity in access.

Full time study at 24 credit hours costing $333 per hour gives us the $8,000 in net tuition cost to the students. With 1,350,360 first-year enrollees, that’s $10.803 billion in total net tuition required to fully finance the first year of higher education study in the inheritance. This is the messy dripping at the bottom of the cone. PSA needs just this tip to cover its operational costs, while the institutions gobble up all the public money there is and then reach into person-citizen-student pockets to skim the cream at the bottom.

So, with a rounded $11 billion in net tuition funding and a rounded 1.4 million first-year students, how many PSA academics are needed to get the job done? Suppose each academic earns full time, as the students learn full time, and their gross annual practice revenue from (only net) tuition is $200,000, then this arrangement can buy society 55,000 professionally licensed and supported academics – traditionally referred to as faculty employees – that independently practice higher education in classrooms with a student-academic ratio of 25:1.

There you go. Using two nominal finance sources that respectively represent 4.5% and 1.5% of the $702 billion spent in 2020-21, first year is done, and done tuition-free, with good earning and learning, with better access, better quality, better mentorship and guidance, diversity, sustainability, and more. 

How much do you think it would cost to get year two or years three and four under the provision and protection of something like PSA? Do you think the total $135 billion in student aid would be enough? How many professionally licensed academics earning $200,000 a year would be needed to help produce undergraduate degrees in everything from physics to philosophy? Would the 675,000 academics that $135 billion could buy be enough for the social good we want? How many academics (or faculty employees) do you think we could recruit to a career in PSA at $200,000 a year? How much would it cost PSA to provide tuition-free (and expense-free) higher education to all 3 million high school graduates? How much credentialed higher education could society afford if the professional model was given just one-seventh the total spending, $100 billion worth of professionally licensed and supported academic-student higher education relationships unincumbered by the cost and clique of the campus?

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75

I’d move to the United States tomorrow if the country offered academics H-1B visas and minimum annual salaries of $200,000 and I bet many academics who would otherwise exit academia for greener pastures would remain for the opportunity to contribute to the social good under a better social contract for earning and learning.

Such as it is, this is how PSA responds to the financial criticism that a profession-based model can't cover the total cost of higher education service and stewardship. It's a financial argument I’ve made many times using only partial sources of common institutional revenue or expense, as I have here. But the philosophical answer is the one that shines most for me.

An example of PSA financial analysis from Australia.

What matters is the higher education, research and community service (HERCS), not facilitation of this social good, or rather, facilitation ought to be determined by the HERCS and not the other way around, as the inheritance has modeled for us over the centuries. Society aims to optimize access to and production of quality HERCS, not to optimize access to and production of universities and colleges. These higher education institutions are but one way to facilitate service and stewardship, they are the only legal, gainful way, and more importantly, they are the way for which PSA offers wholesale challenge. As such, response to this criticism is perhaps best approached from the point of view of HERCS, not HEIs.

Traveling in that direction, with $200,000 in tuition revenue alone, my practice can lease office space, with a seminar room suitable for real student-teacher ratios as low as 6:1, maybe with a shared lounge on the floor or somewhere in the commercial plaza out of which my practice operates, and where gym and dining establishments offer discounts to students of academic practices that lease facilities.

What else does a philosopher, sociologist, economist or historian need to teach, research or otherwise service their communities? Do professional academics in business, humanities, or social sciences need a dean, president, groundskeeper or labour union to provide students the education and credentials they seek in pursuit of personal goals? How about a registrar, admissions, or human resources department? What else do physicists, chemists, engineers, or materials scientists need, and can they get more of it with the rest of us soft-science to no-science academics consuming only the apex of the cone, where $333 per credit hour earns academics a respectable professional income while students earn recognized credentials taking tuition-free courses?

Here I am again, talking about academics and how their (work) lives can be improved by PSA, though this post is supposed to focus on students. However, in this context, there are no academics if there are no students, and there are no students if there are no academics. As a universitas, college is a coin and so is PSA. In point of fact, both are institutions. But unlike a university or college, the professional institution mints with genuine intimacy and interdependence among the relevant relata of higher education, the academic and the student.

I have worked for and studied these public institutions for many years, and I have owned and operated a private education business for many years. I know what my service and stewardship cost to provide as a faculty employee and as an academic entrepreneur. If the state salaried or students vouchered to me $200,000 in tuition revenue a year, then "Shawn’s Philosophy Practice" can guarantee service in a fine facility, with a competent teaching assistant working 20 hours a week for students of the practice, and myself conducting all courses with face-to-face meetings in classes of no more than ten students. 

PSA kicks the shit out of the inheritance, and this is only the beginning of the beating. PSA makes independent higher education practice and academic-student relationships possible. But importantly, the model does so independent of the legislated institutional monopoly on higher education credentials, because the professional model of service and stewardship does not rely on the accreditation or degree-granting status of university and college employer-enrollers. Students can access all the same and better credential authority and legitimacy through another institution, The Professional Society of Academics. If only society wills it.

The PSA blog has put more meat on this bone elsewhere, but for now, operating at the level of something like the University of the State of New York or the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, the professional model does not hire but licenses academics to independent practice, while it also oversees degrees and other credential requirements as the body that keeps record of and issues credentials. To be clear, this is not another university or college that hires and fires, admits and expels, while it holds our earning and learning ransom through monopolistic institutional accreditation and degree-granting status.

The professional model is a wholesale substitution by legislation that declares: From this day forward, PSA-issued credentials are as privileged and protected (if not yet prized) as those of the former institutional higher education monopoly. This is possible because the actual bottom line in matters of academic authority and legitimacy are academics themselves, and PSA puts academics properly in control of higher education (credentials) using a professional model – as attorneys and physicians control their domains – and without the unnecessary institutional employer-enrollers that scarf down the whole fucking cone and scream like spoiled children for more as they toss aside the sticky mess at the bottom.

Let's Churn-out Some New Ice Cream

I don’t see higher education as most do, either in its actual or possible states. A significant reason for that is PSA finances.

Making sure to emphasize that for far less public funding, if professional academics earn as PSA enables, then first-year higher education can be tuition and even expense-free for all 3 million high school graduates, and for every year after that, for as long a person-citizen-student wants to learn, I can now close this post with another demonstration of how PSA can fund an army of well-paid professionally licensed academics for a fraction of the inheritance and with fierce improvement in access, quality and diversity for students.

Typically, 10% of an institution budget goes to capital projects of the new or renewal variety. It was noted earlier that the renewal backlog in America is over $2 trillion, never mind the (public) cost of the shiny new capital that’s needed to recruit and retain employees and enrollees. If PSA consumes only 10% of the total 2022 spending at public institutions, that's $45 billion worth of a cone that’s worth well over $1 trillion a year. Though by now I bet you can do the rest of the reasoning and reckoning yourself, I like to practice.

Operating on the 10% in total public spending, using only the money spent on campus capital projects, society can fund 225,000 academics each earning $200,000 per annum for a student-practice ratio of 6:1 in public higher education. How might this very low ratio help ensure better on-time completion rates that ultimately save students (and society) money? How might such intimacy among academics and students affect societal views of higher education or intellectual work in general? How might this sort of expansive access to higher education affect broader relations in society across race, sex, gender, economic status, political positions, and the like? In PSA, would there be presidents of top higher education institutions answering to the senate and society for the actions of the institutions that employ them, and fire them?

PSA is more like Ben and Jerry’s than Häagen-Dazs, wherein some guys meet at school, bond over shared contempt for the crap that’s going on there, and based on their mutual love of higher education, start a new brand of the social good that competes in the premium market while maintaining a conscience. PSA is our Rainforest Crunch, I guess. I don’t know if this conical attack on the canonical has succeeded, but you’re welcome to come churn some PSA ice cream with me any time.