Following the initial empirical model of the United States public system in 2021, and subsequent comparative analyses of the Canadian (2022) and Australian (2022) higher education sectors, it is time to return to
the US system with an updated, post-pandemic data profile for PSA finance.
Higher education in the United States is routinely described
by administrators, policymakers, and corporate pundits as an enterprise trapped
in permanent fiscal crisis. Over the past five years, the public has been told
that campuses must absorb continuous rounds of austerity: departments
dissolved, tenured lines frozen, tuition incrementally hiked, doctoral
admissions throttled, and two-thirds of the instructional workforce forced into
contingent, per-course wage labor. At the same time, institutional balance
sheets have never been larger, gross revenues across public flagships have
crossed historic highs, and state tax appropriations have rebounded
significantly from their post-Great Recession troughs.
How can a sector take in more revenue than at any point in
human history, yet operate under a perpetual "cuts culture" that
starves the classroom and reduces scholars to academic food-pantry recipients?
The answer lies in the fundamental design flaw of the monopolistic employer-enroller institution (Universitas). The legacy university is an extractive, debt-leveraged corporation that operates as an unnecessary, cost-intensive middleman between the only two essential participants in higher education: the academic and the student.
