Ask folks why they think about the K-12 public school system and you’re likely to hear it’s a mostly one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t allow a whole lot of options. Ask folks what they think about colleges and universities, and lack of choices rarely makes the list of complaints. In a very interesting piece, the Pope Center’s Jenna Ashley Robinson writes that higher education gets a lot more things right than do the monopolistic K-12 schools. Among them:

Professors are paid as individuals, not as a collective.

University professors in demanding fields, especially those with options outside academia, are paid more. Thus, the mean salary for a professor of engineering is $117,911 annually, while a history professor earns, on average, $82,944.

While there can be debate about the merits of the “public-or-perish” criteria, pay differentials are based on individual merit, again unlike K-12 education. Instructors, who do no research, earn less pay than tenure-track professors, who are expected to publish. Moreover, professors are evaluated on their merits when they are up for tenure: How many journal articles have they published? How good (or bad) are their student evaluations? Have they performed any administrative, advising, or outreach work to the satisfaction of the committee? University teachers receive no credit for simply sticking around for a requisite amount of time.

K-12 officials could learn a lot from looking at how the universities operate. Differential pay — it’s a concept whose time has arrived.