The Professional Model Offers More Power to Academics and Students

The authoritative power of academics and students is vitiated by the model of university and college employer-enrollers. This institutional inheritance is assumed by everyone, including labor unions like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the University and College Union (UCU) that represents faculty employees across the United Kingdom, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). Though proclaiming themselves to be champions of the social good, collectively and individually, members of these organizations fail in their fundamental responsibility to challenge this institutional monopoly on higher education earning and learning. As an academic, I have met my social contract obligations to challenge the given and now disclaim the higher education institution (HEI) inheritance. I recommend you do the same and provide reasons and ways for you to do so.

My denial and recommendation are based on an alternative model for higher education called the Professional Society of Academics (PSA). This alternative means of servicing and stewarding the social good is superior to the unchallenged, exclusive use of institutional employer-enrollers. This post shows how PSA offers better conditions for the exercise of group and individual power, with effective checks and balances on the use of funding leverage to manage and manipulate power in higher education.

Academics and Students Gather at Institutional Funding Pools

Some 50,000 resident physicians in the UK just finished a five-day strike for better compensation and working conditions from their state employer, the National Health Service. The University College Union has plastered its social media with solidarity for members of the British Medical Association labor union. These are UCU represented faculty employees who provide physicians with the principal education and training required for independent licensed practice, employees who are part of an academic profession that cannot practice higher education independently of exclusive institutional employment, these knowledge workers want their fellow medical workers to get the money and working conditions that dues-paying members are due. And naturally, if that doesn’t pan out, then both groups can support each other in industrial action they hope will force their higher education or hospital institutional employers to ante up.

In this arrangement, there are several higher education groups taking water at the river of public funding that flows from governments to pool in HEIs, then to HEI employees, and to HEI enrollees, some of which flows back into government coffers in the form of taxes paid by these employees and enrollees who are also voting citizens in democracies like Canada, the US and UK. This is an Escher-river system, where the head is also the mouth and the mouth can bite off the head for noncompliance.

This is weak positioning for citizens who are academics or students. Only, no one knows this because no one knows of a better way, because no one questions the only way.

To see how PSA questions the only way and offers better positioning for academics and students, follow the river of tax-dollars and notice the clusters of powers that draw from it. In the HEI model, the following groups and individuals gather along the river of higher education funding: i) government actors and bureaucracies; ii) university and college employer-enrollers; iii) (unionized) employees of universities and colleges, and iv) (unionized) student enrollees and employees of universities and colleges. In the PSA model, the following groups dip buckets in the river: i) government actors and bureaucracies; ii) a professional society of academics, iii) academics; and iv) students.

In the HEI model, elected governments budget and distribute to universities and colleges hundreds of billions in annual public funding for the social good. This money is then budgeted and distributed by individual institutions for operations; wherein employees individually or collectively scramble for a full bucket from the pecuniary pools that form across campuses each fiscal year. In PSA, elected governments budget and distribute public money back to taxpaying, voting citizen-students through vouchers totaling half the typical annual (under)funding of the HEI model anywhere in the world – or at least this is one among many possible financial arrangements for the PSA model.

At the same time, all one ever hears from organizations like the AAUP, UCU, or CAUT is an ignorant and irresponsible mantra of, “Give us more money!”, which is sometimes chorused with, “Oh, and yeah, give those other state-employed workers more tax dollars too!”.

However, given the reality of fluctuating finite funding, the refrain sounds more like, “Give us more money that only makes the social good more vulnerable to unstable macroeconomics, political climates, intellectual trends, mission drifts, more public money that can be used as leverage against academics and students, and that comes at the expense of the healthcare budget if necessary.” Meanwhile, on-campus solidarity is sliced ever-thinner when the pecuniary pools start to shrink, never mind when the government starts tightening taps across all social budgets, leaving faculty and physician wishing each other good luck in a scarce-funding contest that they enter with the strictest of worker solidarity.

Under PSA, the total public cost of higher education is cut by at least one half. Obviously, asking for less public funding for the same or better service and stewardship means everything I say here about the relationship between money and power is icing on the professional higher education cake.

PSA Dramatically Reduces Funding Leverage Against Academics and Students

When the government cuts funding for higher education, how do the HEI and PSA models respond?

The HEI response is all too familiar. If there aren’t any established, then some employees might try to start labor unions across the various categories of workers in universities and colleges, from the boardroom to the classroom to the boiler room. If there are unions then these organizations will start earning (mandatory) membership fees by flexing in the usual way and too often all the way to the street with signs that shout, “Honk for Academic Freedom!”, “Fire presidents, not profs!”, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions!”, and so on. Naturally, such industrial action is taken in solidarity with other campus employee groups that are each making their collective way with buckets in hand to this season’s public funding pools. There is much more involved in the HEI response to funding cuts and denials, but everyone knows this repeatedly told, centuries old narrative and how it ends.

The PSA response is not at all familiar (in higher education). Setting aside how a professional model arranges better public funding for research and community service, we can focus on the students and academics with buckets in hand who aim to study together for credit toward recognized degrees and other credentials. In one simplified version, the governments first fill student buckets and then students fill academic buckets. This is how society could publicly fund higher education using PSA and without using the monopolistic HEI employer-enrollers. There is no question this professional facilitation is viable for the vast majority of fields and levels of study in higher education.

In the HEI model, the government has a few funding taps it can tighten in response to things like recessions, pandemics, far-leaning presidents, tax increases, or other threats to facilitation of the social good. This control over the funding taps enables governments to (in)directly pit powers against one another: HEIs against each other, HEIs against individuals, HEI employee groups against one another, HEI employee and enrollee groups against one another, in a system that dolls out something called student aid as it tallies up something called student debt. In this environment, government routinely decides it must cut or deny funding to research programs, capital projects, accreditation agencies, government departments, or some other tap-tightening that has significant ripple effects throughout the entire higher education system.

Government actions like these are removed in space and time from other elements of the HEI model like student aid and loan programs, setting and enforcing student loan repayment schedules, or negotiating faculty compensation and working conditions. But the effects of such government funding cuts and denials are eventually felt by all who depend upon the social good, as the board announces the institution can no longer afford X, Y or Z, necessitating tuition hikes, salary cuts, position eliminations, capital renewal deferrals, service fee increases, and other negative ripples from remotely initiated and applied macro-funding decisions of governments or boards.

Funding cuts made inside this sort of hierarchical structure are tricky. Such structures diffuse responsibility and accountability for negative impacts across government departments, institutions, agencies, organizations, boards, unions, and finally individuals who are employees and enrollees trying to earn and learn from one another. This sort of diffusion is well-known to psychologists, sociologists and common sense, as it is well-known and widely relied upon by government funders and institutional employers to manage and manipulate the power of academics and students.

In the PSA model, public funding formally flows first and fully through voting, taxpaying, citizen-students who seek access to higher education services and recognized credentials. There is no upriver HEI employer-enroller, accreditation agency, or research budget that the government can squeeze for leverage, while it officially claims to both meet its financial aid commitments to students and throws the abstract HEI entities under the bus on vague charges of excessive expense, inefficiency, redundancy, elitism, drift, corruption, or the like. In PSA, if the government wants to reduce the public cost of providing and protecting post-secondary education and credentials, then it must cut the tax vouchers it provides directly to voting citizens, including families that currently spend tens of thousands of dollars a year beyond grants and scholarships to send their children to college. There is no middleman departmental scapegoat, no abstract legal entity at which to point a finger, or head to roll in sacrifice to the institution’s brand or bottom line. In PSA, the money flows from government to citizen-student to citizen-academic where successful education services lead to recognized credentials.

Any constriction or interruption in this public funding apparatus will be transparent, immediate, intimate and mutual in impact. Good luck to any government (actor) that plans to cut empowering, direct-to-citizen higher education funding and stay in power in a system where the material interests of students and academics are properly aligned in direct mutual-benefit use of their tax dollars and exercise of their vote, in the absence of institutional and government funding leverage, in a system that has costs reduced by at least fifty percent, and where responsibility and accountability are made intimately and immediately transparent on the frontline of higher education.

Do you think this higher education finance model and the relationship between money and power that it profiles is unrealistic? Let’s look at some of the HEI money that flows in the public funding river to see if the financial prospects of PSA are realistic.

The total student aid and loan package approved by the US Senate for fiscal year 2025 is worth $135 billion, and this is typically not the end of such spending in any given year, nor does it include the tens of billions in tax dollars spent on bureaucratic oversight of this funding from government coffers to institutional classrooms and faculty employee bank accounts. In 2022, there was a headcount of around 950,000 faculty in the US public higher education system, working in everything from 2-year colleges to 4-year universities, with employment security that ranges from precarious adjunct to tenured professor, and earning that ranges from a flat rate of a few thousand dollars for a 3-credit hour course to a $200,000 annual salary with full medical and retirement benefits.

PSA uses less public funding in a professional service and stewardship model for higher education where the $135 billion is divide by the 950,000 eggheads thereby enabling each academic to earn $142,105 a year, with these public funds flowing from student to academic buckets, with no skimming from middleman institutions like the City University of New York where 11,000 part-time faculty teach the majority of classes and are paid $7,100 for a 3-credit hour course – which without a hint of shame the National Education Association loudly and proudly declares has risen in the past few years from $3,200 thanks to the tireless efforts of faculty labor unions. Only an ignorant, irresponsible labor union for dues-paying faculty employees could think this sort of tiresome action is appropriate stewardship for the social good.

Do you think I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about when it comes to higher education finance? Total expenditures by public HEIs was $450 billion in 2020-21. Using half this figure, PSA would enable every single faculty worker – from adjunct lecturer to full professor – to earn a gross annual income of $473,684 practicing higher education as other professionals practice the social goods of law and medicine.

But perhaps this is too crude a financial analysis for you. Then let’s look at net tuition and fee revenue. According to the State of Higher Education Finance Report for 2024,

• On the low end, net tuition and fee revenue was $2,472 per full time equivalent (FTE) student in Florida. On the high end, net tuition and fee revenue was $19,797 in Delaware.
• Net tuition and fee revenue per FTE declined in 37 states and Washington, D.C., between 2023 and 2024. Despite these recent declines, since 1980, net tuition and fee revenue per FTE has increased in every state, and by more than 100% in 41 states.
• Net tuition and fee revenue at two-year institutions averaged $2,728 per FTE in 2024, down 3.5% from 2023. At four-year institutions, net tuition and fee revenue averaged $10,446 per FTE, down 2.8%, but still 3.8 times the average net tuition and fee revenue in the two-year sector. 

As an academic, I have nearly two decades of experience as a faculty employee in universities and seven years as the owner of an education company. If as a PSA academic I serviced the workload of 50 FTE students each year, I’d earn $136,400 in practice revenue relying on only the net tuition and fee revenue of two-year colleges. I assure you that PSA is a feasible education and business model and given the near four-fold difference in net tuition and fee revenue between two- and four-year institution, any state that adopted this professional model would have considerable room to adjust these numbers in service to all types of education seekers. It must be stressed that PSA only uses a portion of this singular revenue source which represents a fraction of the total revenue these institutions gobble up in operations that include facilitation of courses in philosophy, history, sociology, statistics, mathematics, English, psychology, economics, film studies,...

Do you still think me naïve about how the HEI finance model works? According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2020–21, instruction expenses, including faculty salaries and benefits, was the largest single expense category at public 2-year and 4-year degree-granting postsecondary institutions. Instruction expenses made up

• 38 percent of core expenses (or $8,040 per FTE student) at public 2-year institutions; and
• 34 percent of core expenses (or $13,540 per FTE student) at public 4-year institutions.

Using only the public funding that goes to this institutional employer-enroller expense, students carry their bucket of instructional tax dollars to academics who enroll them for courses and other services offered through independent licensed professional solo or partnered higher education practices. With an average instructional voucher of $10,827, if I had an annual enrollment of one-hundred students, each spending a tenth of that voucher on my academic services, then I’d earn more than most faculty employees in the US. If I earned double that from each of these students, this $216,540 a year in practice revenue would place my earnings among an elite group of faculty employees in the academe.

To make the case that PSA is far cheaper to operate than the exclusive, assumed, inherited HEI model, I’ve provided other financial analyses like this post that uses the cost per credit hour. But I suppose you can see where all these financial analyses lead. So far, to provide higher education and credentials, PSA only uses between 10% and 20% of this singular frontline HEI instructional expense. It is comical to think how far off my financial estimates would have to be for the professional model to offer inferior public finance to the university and college employer-enroller model that constantly cries poor, and often from the sidewalk with confrontational, accusatory placards. I have worked as faulty in universities, and I have owned a private business offering university-level education. I assure you that on this sort of annual practice revenue I can provide the same service and stewardship that I did as a unionized faculty employee, only as an independent, professionally licensed and supported academic entrepreneur.

In this new arrangement of professional education facilitation and finance, the power of academics and students is strengthened and amplified, which means that higher education service and stewardship are strengthened and amplified. There is no diffusion of responsibility or accountability, because there are no hierarchical scapegoats like a politicized board of trustees or an administration bent on increasing its compensation, while government funding providers are directly responsible to and held accountable by the taxpaying, voting citizen-students and -academics who are co-incentivized and co-responsible in the formation of education relationships that benefit individuals and society.

With PSA in place, much of the management and manipulation of academics and students that is made possible through opaque, complicated, distanced and diffused funding decisions are dissolved. No institutional employer can effectively threaten my employment because I have no need for an employer to earn a good living as a higher education practitioner. No government will find it easy to cut instructional vouchers to citizens who are united in their higher education functions and interests. The usual actors that diminish, deny or otherwise interfere in the exercise of power by academics and students are either weakened or removed. This sort of earning and learning emancipation for citizen-academics and citizen-students is not possible in the exclusive HEI employment and enrollment model, making universities and colleges an inferior finance, function and fidelity model for academics and students and so for the social good.

 

Been There, Done That

Having begun with an analogy between physician and faculty employees of the state, an objection might go: The professional model offers academics who currently can only earn a living in higher education as faculty employees of HEIs what already exists for physicians and attorneys who are also employed of the state, and obviously, this arrangement has not stopped these professionals from taking industrial actions like strikes; so, the PSA model for higher education is unlikely to improve things for academics, students and others who depend upon the social good.

A reply requires some context. The conditions under which professionals like attorneys and physicians receive public funds as compensation for their service and stewardship are not uniform. For instance, in Canada, virtually all doctors are in private practice, billing the state for medical services to the public that range from GP consultations to surgical procedures. In sharp contrast, only about 2% of physicians work in private practice outside the NHS system of the UK. Earning and working conditions in law vary as well, though whether its Canada, the UK, or the US, most practitioners earn in solo or partnered practice, not as state employees. Further, the turnover rate for legal and medical professionals employed by the state is very high, as are burnout rates and administrative workloads.

For further context, it is true that medical research and service is more capital intensive than law, which means that in countries like Canada, the UK and the US the state is expected to play a significant role in funding and facilitating the provision of physician service and stewardship to society. The same can be said of some fields of study and research in higher education, with the university hospital serving as a prime example, though there is also experimental work in hard sciences like physics, chemistry, or geology. So, whether it’s an MRI or LHC, funding on a state scale is typically required to cover the costs of very expensive areas of research and study, while substantial state support is not required in other areas of higher education like philosophy, history, and sociology.

Further, it is true that the person – patient, client or student – is the subject of professional attention and service in the social goods of medicine, law, and higher education, and that within these areas, typically there are interdependent subfields, specialties or areas of expertise that are available to the public. However, the level of integration, interdependence, intimacy and impact of the mixed and related services within these social goods is quite diverse, with law and medicine capable of having immediate, direct, significant, even life-altering consequences for people that seek these professionals, while higher education has less of this – which is not to say that the impact of higher education on people is insignificant.

With this context in mind, the objection is dissolved. As a start, I have demonstrated that higher education can be publicly funded for as little as twenty or thirty percent of what public universities and colleges spend on instruction alone, or grabbing a different public source, student aid and loan program funding is sufficient to operate the PSA model. This means that for as low as one-fifth the cost of instruction in the HEI model, all degrees in the Humanities, Law, Business, Soft Sciences, and classroom-based courses of the Hard Sciences, can be provided by professionally licensed academics who earn a living as independent higher education practitioners through a student voucher system like the new US G.I. Bill or a billing apparatus like the one used in Canadian healthcare. 

If a professionally licensed philosophy, history, economics, or statistics instructor can provide the higher education (credit) courses that students seek, then the academic provider earns a respectable living in a public system that can be truly tuition- or expense-free. There are no high stakes or high overheads, as one finds in medical or chemical laboratories. It is a system where academics earn more with more control over their work, as students learn with more control over their education and the public has its bill substantially reduced with improved responsibility, accountability and transparency in the funding.

What choice do you think academics and students would make in the UK, US and Canada if something like PSA was available to citizens? Would academics choose faculty employment with its shitty compensation and regular resort to disruptive, divisive industrial action? Would students prefer to pay both publicly and privately for higher education and credentials rather than access a tuition- or expense-free version of the social good from instructors they personally choose and directly pay for service and stewardship? But more importantly, would academics and students welcome the choice?

There is no disputing that the existence of an option like PSA would dilute or dissolve the (funding leverage) powers that negatively impact the power of academics and students. If there is no institutional employer-enroller monopoly, then academics and students need not subject themselves to the power dynamics of universities, colleges, unions, governments, etc. Rather, PSA positions academics and students as the ones to exercise leverage over hierarchical funding decision-makers of the sort that currently manage and manipulate frontline workers and learners.

Canada and the UK have large public healthcare systems, though they position their medical professionals quite differently within them, while no country in the world offers the capacity for academics and students to earn and learn together independently of the HEI monopoly on higher education earning and learning. I invite you to engage with this viable, desirable professional alternative to the globally assumed, unchallenged, institutional model of our inheritance.