Opinion: Schools = Business
By Mike Degen
On Friday, October 13, graduate students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) began voting on whether or not they want to unionize. Unionization is a word most commonly heard in the world of business and is related to the organization of workers. Unions negotiate contracts with employers in order to improve working conditions, increase pay, and better employees’ lives.
Several unions making news recently include SAG-AFTRA (The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), the Writers Guild of America, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the ALU (Amazon Labor Union). The discussion of unions at the university made me consider: Is a school run like a business? Here’s what I found.
There are a lot of similarities between universities and businesses. Let’s start with the obvious. Both universities and businesses offer goods and services. For example, Lulu’s offers its customers bagels and coffee. UAF offers its students education, degrees, and other services. Further, customers exchange money for those goods and services. At Lulu’s, I whip out my credit card to pay for my bagel and latte. UAF collects tuition and fees for its services. Both companies and universities refer to this money as revenue.
All businesses have expenses including overhead costs, marketing costs, and operating costs. Universities function the same way, and the 2022 operating budget shows the millions in costs the university faces each year [1].
Other costs include employee salaries. Oftentimes, companies pay as little as they can to get people to work for them. Thankfully, the federal government (and state governments) have instituted minimum wages to force companies (and schools) to pay their employees. Often, these minimum wages are not enough, which is one of the reasons that unions are formed. While unions often lead to positive outcomes for workers, companies find these unions a nuisance. As one TIME magazine [2] article notes, companies in the United States have always had contentious relationships with unions, even more so than other countries.
Companies use a variety of tactics to suppress unions, including the use of propaganda, retaliation, and even violence. A more extensive article by the Economic Policy Institute [3] outlines recent examples of anti-union tactics used by companies including Amazon, Google, and Starbucks.
Just like companies, UAF engages in anti-union tactics through the use of propaganda. The school sent a confusing email to graduate students in which it claimed that the union “may cost students more” without any evidence. This message was repeated through the display of fliers across campus. UAF also paid for digital advertising reiterating this anti-union sentiment.
Anti-union advertising from the UAF Administration
Photo by Manuel A. Melendez
Included in this messaging was confusing language. One example includes the claim from UAF that the union would be a “one-size fits all” and may “not work for some students.” No one is entirely sure what this means, and when I attempted to ask the sender of the email, I was alerted that it was a no-response message. It is unclear who wrote this email, and what office at UAF was behind union suppression.
Another idea relating to our line of questioning is the idea of revenue growth. Companies grow their revenue by acquiring new customers, offering new products, and increasing prices. UAF engages in all three of these activities. While companies market their products, UAF markets their services and makes this objective clear at the top of page three of the budget [4] which reads, “investments have been made in marketing and recruitment.” Further, UAF offers new ‘products’ in the forms of new degrees, certificates, and classes. Finally, UAF continues to increase both its tuition and fees [5] despite pleas from the student government not to do so.
Between the goods and services it offers, its compensation for executives, and its demonstration of anti-union sentiment, it's safe to say that UAF functions like a business. Is this the right way to run a university?
College education is not mandated by law, though in practice, a higher education is mandated ad populum because so many companies and careers require degrees from universities in order to work. With that said, it is a student’s choice to go to college, and universities can charge as much, or as little, as they like. While that’s true, is it right? Should universities be charging ever-increasing rates of tuition while administrators can make six-figure salaries? It doesn’t seem fair to me and I can only hope that in the future we reconsider the business-like manner in which we run universities in the United States.
Sources:
[1] UAF FY 2022 Budget: https://www.uaf.edu/finserv/omb/budget-planning/fy22/
[2] TIME: https://time.com/6168898/why-companies-fight-unions/
[3] Economic Policy Institute: https://www.epi.org/blog/employers-regularly-engage-in-tactics-to-suppress-unions-examples-at-starbucks-amazon-and-google-illustrate-employers-anti-union-playbook/
[4] https://www.alaska.edu/swbudget/files/redbook/FY22_Redbook_Revised_Web.pdf
[5] https://www.uaf.edu/finaid/costs/