A Day in PSA

This sketches an alternative means of providing higher education, offered in the style now common to faculty activism. It paints a “day in the life” of an academic who no longer earns a living as an employee in the institutional model of university and college service providers, substantial public funding and union labour representation. [Part 2 of this story.]

PSA Promotes Too Much Free Education

Imagine a society that felt: Because of how expensive it is to provide, there is no substantial benefit to publicly fund primary and secondary education, so anyone who wants such education must privately pay for it through personal savings or loans. Further, because of the expense, this education is not equally accessible to members of society and susceptible to wide variation in quality.

What is your reaction? I expect most feel that this view undermines dignity and aspiration to the point of being cruel to individuals and counterproductive to societies.

HEI Closures or PSA Conversions: What’s to Lose?

In 2013, I posted a pair of responses to the crisis faced by the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) as its accreditation was about to be pulled. Along with the administrative and support staff, 2600 academics and 90,000 students were to lose their access to higher education (HE). At that time, I explained how loss of accreditation is not loss of the qualified academics that provide education or the students that seek it, but merely the loss of a middleman. In the absence of such institutional tools, the talents and targets of students and academics remain.

Universities and colleges are not HE. Academics and students are HE.

PSA Financial Analysis - Australia

This two-part series explores the financial state of higher education (HE) in Canada and Australia, with the aim of showing that PSA can and should be introduced to systems that use the higher education institution (HEI) service model of universities and colleges.

PSA Financial Analysis – Canada

Having completed a series of posts covering an historical sociological framework for PSA - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 - it now seems appropriate to provide a modern financial perspective in support of the model. Though prior posts have applied the PSA model to higher education (HE) finances in the American and Chinese systems, it is important to offer a more nuanced financial picture. To this end, I offer a two-part series in which HE financial data from Canada and Australia is used to demonstrate the viability and desirability of PSA. Followed by Australia, this post looks at Canada.

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 3

First in Bologna and then in Paris, this series has looked at the 12^th and 13^th century origins of the modern higher education institutions (HEIs) we refer to as universities and colleges. Described as a process of confluence and conflict, the heritage was casually framed within power analyses common to sociology. Then, as today, there were macro economic and political forces that acted to transform and maintain the functions of higher education (HE), while individuals and groups jockeyed for favourable position within the system social milieu. We have seen that the modern conception and expression of a university are derived from the Latin, universitas, which in its original academic form were groups of teachers and students united in pursuit of intimately related and mutually beneficial goals that had manifest and latent impact on HE and society at large (Merton, 1957). We have also seen how the introduction of endowed colleges and salaried lectureships inserted a wedge of powerful papal and royal interests into the teacher-student relationship. As a result, our inheritance was not a university of masters and scholars, but of bloated buildings, budgets, and bureaucracies.