My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

What I have seen is that there are many different good explainations of material. However some of these will result in faster uptake by me. The only way the economic transaction of education makes sense to me is to acknowledge the potential of passive learning (books, internet), but to recognize the desire to speed the process. While I can pick up a book on abstract algebra and work through the problems myself to gain understanding, I know that I can pay someone who already is an expert in abstract algebra to package up the mental abstractions for me. Its like using compression for webpages. You could transmit everything uncompressed and the web would work just fine. However we want to save time and money so we compress, delivering content faster and using less bandwidth. The only justification I can see for teachers to exist in a free market is that they speed the process of knowledge aquisition.

Now I support fee schedules based on how much work the teacher has to do the shove the knowledge into the head. If it will cost $X for a fast student, I don't have any problem with the market pricing that same knowledge to a slow student at $X,XXX. Teachers should be compensated for their expertise. However setting the market price is up to the participant, and a contract to deliver the good should be binding. If teachers were bound to deliver the information, then I see average prices being higher becuase of the lemon effect, but that is an entirely different problem than what we have now.

Well, yes, if the CSRs treat the product as their own and tell people that their job is creating the product, sure we'll blame them!

The faster that university professors admit that degrees are not a product of the professors, they're a product of the administrators and accreditors and the social system that expects people to have degrees, the faster they'll get out of the way of blame.

You seem to be confusing grade school and university.

The lecturers and professors you will find at university are not experts in pedagogy, and the vast majority will never have claimed they were. They are experts and leading active researchers in their chosen field. They have devoted their professional life to studying and extending the state of the art of knowledge in their chosen field.

If you want to study a subject at university level, it's likely that some of the material that you would learn at university is not yet in published books, because the only people who currently know the material are the researchers at your university who just discovered it, and are trying hard to find the time to write a book on it, around furthering their research, writing papers for journals (which they need to do, and which books do not count towards) and giving however many classes of lectures a week that they've been told to get on with, without a vast amount of training.

In grade school, the material you will learn are basics of subjects that have been understood for a while, and written and refined in books some time ago. The material can be understood by people competent (but not necessarily expert) in the field, and can therefore be passed on, or spoon-fed, by people who are expert professional teachers. This is required in grade school, because students in grade school are not yet adults, and generally don't yet have enough self-discipline and self-awareness to put in the work now for later benefit without being shepherded the whole way.

When you get to university, it is presumed that you are mature enough to have the self-discipline and self-awareness to figure out partly for yourself how to learn from the people who are the most advanced in the world in your chosen field, rather than the best teachers.

That presumption seems to have worked out pretty well for modern universities for the last 500 years.

Maybe university is not actually the place you want to be.

My lectures are designed to supplement learning that my students are expected to have done prior to class. The lectures are a summary of the material, with worked examples, a chance to ask questions to clear up misunderstandings, and for discussion of key concepts.

Lectures are attended by dozens of students, so they cannot be a personalized tutorial service. That's what office hours are for. My best students don't usually need office hours as they are pretty much self-taught, but the next tier down show up regularly and we sit down together and go through exactly the material they want to focus on in the detail they need.

I tailor my pedagogy to these engaged students, not to the ones who expect to be handed an A for a minimum amount of effort. If you don't work, you'll deservedly do very poorly, and I'm not willing to waste my limited resources on you. And, no, I'm not going to curve your grade up either, because that's not fair on the good students.

Unsurprisingly, poor students don't show up to office hours, don't take advantage of our free tutoring service, turn in material late, and regularly miss lectures. All these failings are entirely their own responsibility, not mine.