The Daily Telegraph reports:
The pay packets of Britain’s university heads rocketed by as much as a fifth last year, just as institutions lobbied for a huge hike in student tuition fees…
More than 950 university staff, including all vice-chancellors, were paid more than the Prime Minister – an eight per cent increase on the year before.
One senior administrator at Oxford was given a salary of almost £600,000, thought to be the highest-paid university post in the country…
Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union, added: “Staff and the general public are tired of the hypocrisy from vice-chancellors and their lack of self-awareness when it comes to pay is insulting.”…
Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, told The Daily Telegraph at the time that university leaders needed to show “realism and self-sacrifice” and that their pay bore “no relation to the underlying economics of the country”.
Yet the average pay packet was £254,000, more than five times the average academic salary of almost £47,000.
One issue the article does not really address, but which the pay figures may focus more attention on in future, is the complicated administrative structure at most universities. Mapping out the overlapping roles of departments, faculties, colleges, schools, central administration and more in different institutions can make other parts of the public sector look remarkably simply by comparison, as I’ve experienced first hand working in one form or another at three different universities.
Yet the reforming zeal that is calling for changed and simplified structures in many other parts of public life has not – so far – really touched the university sector.
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29 Comments
Well, it is certainly fair to say that for all the controversy about fees the question of WHY the costs of university (appear) to have risen so much has not really been debated as much as it should have been. As an aside here, the costs of academic journals is a very interesting discussion. The NHS has a very good idea of ‘NHS inflation’ and it is odd that HE has not developed something similar.
In saying that I struggle to see the proposed fee arrangements being some sort of a check on excessive pay in the university sector. Vice-Chancellor pay is a symptom, not a cause of problems and some sort of review into high pay is needed. It will never fly with the Conservative Party though.
Very odd.
The very highly paid person at Oxford is i think the fund manager for their investments whet markets rates are high (this is low for someone really good at managing money), so not really comparable with the other academic jobs.
Also worth noting this is a job where it is very essay to tell how well the job holder is performing!
I don’t think the most pressing issue in higher education is the salary of VC’s ( a drop in the ocean), or the overlapping roles (not something I recognise, and I’m an academic). Rather it’s the obscene government cuts in the teaching budget and the small reduction in the research budget. At a time when almost every other developed nation on the planet is investing in the HE sector the UK stands almost alone in actually reducing funding and making it a less attractive option for young people. Not only that the visa caps and fees risk a drastic reduction in the number of postgrad students, who are the lecturers of the future, as well as the bankruptcy of many universities as undergrad intake falls as large debts put people off.
Trust me, universities are not something Lib Dems should dare comment on these days.
The £2.9bn (80%) cut in direct funding for tertiary teaching is already having far ranging effects within the university sector. One result of this is the cancellation of ALL of the OU’s social sciences masters courses after a final intake in May 2011. This affects approximately 2,000 students each year who are used to paying up-front for their education. I’ve blogged about it here: http://bit.ly/i5oyYq
The only conclusion I can draw from the way in which the cuts to HE have been made is that many of our LibDem parliamentarians didn’t realise how awful consequences would be of supporting a vicious Tory ideology of the virtual privatisation of universities.
VCs’ pay is a bit of a scandal at a time when universities are cutting academic jobs.
I really cannot quite see why running a universoty should entitle anybody to a bigger salary than the PM gets for running the country.
But there is so much going wrong with the sector. The cut in teaching grants (especially for arts&humanities and the reduction in research grants is problematic.
But my main gripe is that Labour’s old control freakery persists in the sector, and nobody seems to want to do anything about it. This coalition government has been talking about cutting the target and top-down control culture in all areas, but universities are still subject to all those completely mad assessment exercises. I am not against accountability – but as public funding recedes, we have to think whether it is really necessary to spend massive amounts of money, time and effort on the RAE/REF, the QAA and the TQA. There has to be a cheaper and less damaging way to make sure that universities do their job for the money they are getting (not thatmuch money from government anyway). These monitoring exercises aren’t only responsible for massive administration – they have plenty of unintended consequences such as short-termism and artifical hiring cycles (often with an incentive not to hire the best person for the job but the person who ticks the best boxes for the exercise).
The control-freakery has to stop so that universities can actually focus on what they should be doing, namely teaching and research. Teaching in particular will need to be more central, and there has to be more space for it – but the target-driven incentives simply don’t point in that diection. No wonder students aren’t happy.
I had high hopes in Cable&Willetts in this respect, but they have been truly disappointing. If they have to take away central funding, they should surely lift many of those controls, too and let us get on with our real jobs….
Why are some full-time undergraduate courses more like part-time in reality?
The private Buckingham University delivers degrees in an intensive two year period. Would this be a sensible way forward for all universities?
Just asking – I’d be interested in informed opinions.
Intensive two year courses should be feasible; I did a BA an LLB and an LLM part-time whilst working, and in the case if the BA whilst a councillor on a principle local authority too ( did I mention a low boredom threshold? ).
Paid the same annual fees as the full-timers too despite doing fewer modules on the LLB!!
I did notice both on the evening modules and some of the daytime ones a small but noticeable cohort who were not interested in working just messing about. These were often the ones who struggled to cope with the intellectual challenge once we got past the “first year” modules, which did make me wonder whether the target of 50% of school leavers going to university was such a wise one. Standards need to be maintained and people mature at different rates so perhaps an intensive two year programme for some, easier access to part-time study in later life for others, OU / distance learning for another group etc, in other words greater diversity in modes of delivery and means of access may be more suited to today’s world.
Before anyone calls me a hypocrite for suggesting too many young people go to university, whilst I may have got a “Distinction” grade for my LLM, I also got awful “A” levels, and dropped out of Polytechnic at the age of 20.
I have had the privilege of studying under some truly great or inspiring academics, like Chris Cooper who was the marketing communications guru at Wolverhampton, Graham Wright BCU’s ace crime guy, the same institution’s stunningly intelligent Anne Oakes, enviro-whiz Dr Haydn Davies, and the unforgettable charming former Oxford man (and, it turned out fellow local Lib Dem) David Hartley.
Sadly, like the Curate’s Egg, the standard of academic staff was, My Lord, good in parts. For every star like Professor Meryl Thomas, who could make the most boring topic known to human kind (property law) interesting there was a time-served numpty who taught poorly, didn’t have a sufficient command of their subject or were so “up themselves” with their own self-importance they felt it acceptable to be rude and insulting to even the keenest of students and were always looking for new ways if demonstrating their intellectual superiority (and lack of social skills) to their audiences.
I cannot hold with the view that there does not need to be proper regulation of higher education, and the need for fair, consistent and transparent standards is great. If you get a “Desmond” (2:2) from ANY British University then the standard of your work, the value of your degree should be the same. Whilst the social cache and recognition of youthful excellence / picking the right parents / going to the right school that attaches to certain institutions will always be around, we need and deserve consistency and excellence to be standard.
We also need to address other pressing questions rather than setting some up for ignominy. How, for example, do we address the lack of technician level people in employment, or the often ingrained “White collar = good, blue collar = bad” mentality of many teachers?
By all means pay attractive salaries to the best academics. If they deserve it, and it can be justified based on quality and performance then pay a decent whack. Let us not play that Great British game of resenting success but instead let us celebrate it. Such an approach is not inconsistent with protecting the weak or the less able.
Implicit in this is some bad news for the incompetent, the lazy and the aloof. If you don’t umprove, be prepared to move.
Students are customers. They deserve to get what they pay for, as does the nation.
Chris, Buckingham is a bit of a joke university with respect to many of its courses so be way of citing it as an example to be followed. But, the biggest objection to two year courses is that they would almost certainly be in breach of the Bologna Process, and thus be regarded as near worthless outside of the UK, as it is many one year UK Master’s degrees skirt the edge of minimum standards with respect to the opinion of the rest of the world.
Of course you could argue that shorter degrees be awarded a lesser qualification to get around this, but then the consequences of that would be that many people, mostly from poorer backgrounds, would not attain a full length qualification and you would exacerbate class based divides in higher education.
As I said, what you have done to universities means that you really should consider your thoughts carefully before offering advice.
@g
“I don’t think the most pressing issue in higher education is the salary of VC’s ( a drop in the ocean)”
Here’s a list of VC’s pay from 2005-2006. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?navcode=0&pubcode=1&typecode=131&subtypecode=16 , from 2008-2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/mar/12/universities-high-pay-top-data .
The truth is I remember the feelings in the student union at what students felt was excessive pay when for example at Liverpool University they are paid £386,000/year.
Regarding the administrative structure and internal university bureaucracy over a period of 10 years I saw this change. Some changes the students approved of, but most seemed to be made to suit the university and not its staff or students which became increasingly frustrated with a paper pushing jobsworth approach to bureaucracy which saw things that previously could be done on the spot (eg being issued with a library card) now taking a week or two.
Even disabled students were charged a “deposit” for equipment and extra charges for disabled students due to cutbacks as they deemed notetakers too expensive for students who couldn’t write. After fees came in, students felt increasingly frustrated as they saw the level of service they were receiving and complaints process as below that they’d grown up to expect from shops and other commercial transactions.
Chris Williams, you know that most academics are appointed on the basis of their research skills, not their teaching?
I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but given that teaching budgets have been cut far more that research budgets this situation will not change. There is no reason for an academic to choose teaching as their main focus if there is less money available.
And students are not customers. A student does not get a good mark because they pay X amount of money, they get a good mark because they are bright and work hard. They can expect a minimum standard, but they are measured on their own ability above all else.
John Brace, if you’d asked me at the beginning of May if VC pay was a pressing issue I would have said yes, things changed at the end of May.
I absolutely agree about the disability issues, I have disabilities myself that has to be accounted for by my university when I was student (without problems as it happens), I mentored other students in similar situations and I still help out when I can through my current employers disability services. However, the government have made it more difficult for disabled students and staff by changing the disabilities and the financial threshold for which support can be expected.
Did you know that government no longer subsidises employers who take on staff with specific learning disorders, who maybe unable to work without a computer? The system was by no means perfect before, and certainly needed revised, but scrapping it is obscene. I would not be able to do my job now if my employer didn’t act above the minimum required by law!
reform, reform, reform.
2 yr degrees. more distance-learning & more electronic resource usage. less overlap of admin roles, greater contribution to the cost of HE – all required urgently.
without reform of the HE sector, all the fee rises in the world will not prevent the cost of teaching at university from sky-rocketing – and as an academic with a tenuous future ahead I can only express my deepest distaste at the perverse remuneration of many non-academic staff.
bankers’ remuneration is widely recognised to have distorted the aims, operational behaviour and outcomes of banks, which are central to the economic success of a nation. can anyone convince me that super-star pay (and the inevitable concomitant diversion of talent towards largely unproductive roles within the sector) doesn’t similarly distort university performance?
not enough is being done- either by institutions of by government – to address the imbalance in the HE sector.
This is what A Green Party PPC, the father of a student said about uni: “I have a son that is at University at the moment and living at home, he attends about 3 half days per week (if that)….it costs alot of money to run a university that inefficiently and somebody has to pay the bill for a 4 year course that could be covered in 2 (or maybe less), currently that is largely the taxpayer, much higher education is a gravy train for the Universities and lecturers….I believe that we need a massive shakeup in the way that higher education is delivered…..subsidising mediocrity is not the answer, and much higher education is just that. The Green Party should be trying to encourage people to question their wasteful overconsumption, not justifying the idea that our current lifestyles are acceptable or sustainable”
and of course when Universities are run as private instituitions then VC’s will be able to pay themselves a great deal more.
Usual old Tory ideology – attack the weak viz students but support the Tories viz those who were needed to provide media support for the LibDem volte-face on tuition fees to back-up their Tory masters.
And they attack the NHS for too much bureaucracy and waste.
New politics don’t make me laugh 🙂
Bosses being able to give themselves hugh salaries – I am sure the tory party are not going to be thinking of stopping it are they since supporting rich bosses are what the tory party is all about.
@da e thawley actually company bosses can’t just pay themselves what they like – unless they own the company.
Plenty of scope for improving how they are paid but your statement is factually correct.
@g any evidence universities are going to become private institutions?
The post above that stated the University of Buckingham is a “joke university” demonstrates how easy it is to give an opinion based on ignorance. When comparing different courses attention should focus on the number of weeks a students needs to attend per academic year, together with the the number of contact teaching hours. From what I understand, the majority of students at Buckingham complete their studies in just over two years by studying 9 ten week terms (=90 weeks). This equal to those universities which teach over three years (3 x 10 weeks per academic year) = 90 weeks.
It is my understanding that all UK universities are private institutions but are reliant on government money, namely teaching and research grants, to remain financially viable.
@Nigel
g is correct. The only things that Buckingham demonstrates is that, even with the kindest press imaginable, and a wholly profit-generating motive, the UK can’t support any private university undergraduate courses in most disciplines. Buckingham doesn’t run any science or engineering courses (to name a few) because they cost too much to run and there is no way they can compete in terms of quality or breadth with any current UK public providers, who do deliver economically important courses far better than the flagship private UK institution ever could – not to mention the essential impossibility of them ever being able to attract the necessary research talent.
Here is a simple test. Go and find an arbitary list of ‘top employers’, ones you know recruit only from certain universities. Ask them if they consider Buckingham graduates. When you have recovered from the merry ring of laughter, check the entry tarriffs for Buckingham courses, because they actually do have requirements other than wallet depth. However, you will find the financial requirements rather more rigorous than the academic ones. Buckingham is approximately equivalent in standing of some of the less-regarded post-92 institutions, only rather more expensive.
2 year degree courses may be a great idea on paper if your only interest is to deliver something you can package as ‘a Bachelors degree’ as cheaply as possible without any concern about how it is perceived by employers or outside the UK, and if you are completely unmoved by the idea that a higher education qualification should have some link to the best quality research available.
But in the real wor;d, especially given how recalcitrant the UK was with Bologna, and industry now openly comparing the content of our three year courses with the longer degrees common in Europe – only held in check because a UK degree is still considered a hallmark of quality – the only thing that a UK switch to predominantly 2 year degrees will guarantee is a massive boost for European graduates looking for work in the UK.
This is great if you’re a Europhile- or Dutch – but not brilliant if you think that the job of the UK Government is not to deliberately wreck one of our few globally-admired systems to the benefit of French graduates.
@ Chris Riley…no science at Buckingham, then google Clore Laboratory, also doctors who have recently graduated from Buckingham with an MD may also be puzzled by your comment.
Graduate employability in business….the head of Proctor and Gamble for UK and Eire and a current board member of BMW, to highlight but two examples, may also take issue with you.
By the way Buckingham is an educational charity……charities do not make profits.
The UCAS tariff points system is a mechanism necessary to select candidates when a government restricts the numbers to enter higher education, it is not a reflection of the quality of education provided by universities.
How is a two year degree taught over 90 weeks different from a three year degree taught over 90 weeks?
Nigel Rogers, the Buckingham MD is a iffy postgrad qualification that shares its abbreviation with the North American medical degree (a very curious coincidence).
http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/science/md/generalinternalmedicine
Their school of medicine also has some very interesting faculty members…..
@g hopefully you will not take ill if you are ever in North America otherwise you will be treated by doctors with an “iffy” medical qualification…….not sure how the those world leading private medical schools e.g. Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins et al would view you comment….probably with derision
@g – According to you we shouldn’t ‘dare’ to comment as a party on these things.
Isn’t that a rather threatening tone? You know a Lib Dem majority would scrap fees, and you know that Labour would have followed through the Browne Review which they set up. Almost all your comments should instead be directed at the Labour leadership and Conservative party to try and persuade them to agree with our party policy.*
*This is assuming that the purpose of your posts is to persuade and engender change rather than stifle constructive debate and discussion.
Yet the reforming zeal that is calling for changed and simplified structures in many other parts of public life has not – so far – really touched the university sector.
Mark I have worked in the university sector for 30 years and, I could have written something VERY rude in response to that and to the paragraph before it in your article.
Universities used to be run in a collegial fashion. They were essentially a community of scholars. All those departments and faculties and things you deride were part of something we Liberals used to support – industrial democracy.
I have been in my post as a university lecturer long enough to remember when my department was run in a collective way – we had regular department meetings which were decision making. Now the department is run entirely by the Head who appoints his own “Senior Management Team”, and the Head is appointed over us by the University senior management, there is only a token consultation.
The same is happening in every other university I know of – there has been a gradual diminishing of those aspects of the university which were collegial/democratic, and a gradual strengthening of top-down control from university management. This is always justified on the grounds it is more “businesslike” and it is “modernisation”.
Departments used to be very autonomous, so the university itself could in many ways be seen as a federation of departments. This is what you are deriding in your penultimate paragraph – the sort of decentralisation, autonomy, democracy, and structures that give pride and satisfaction in work -which I joined our party because I thought that was what it stood for, how it wanted society in general to be organised. Inevitably democracy is complicated, and that is one of the things its enemies use against it. Also, the enemies of democracy are very keen on using words like “modernisation” to destroy it, claiming that somehow its destruction is inevitable and its only silly fuddy-duddies who resist it.
Of course, the centralisation an imposition of top-down control with all its targeting and the like had brought its own complications. Most of all, it has turned academic staff into people who no longer take pride in their job, but who just desperately try to keep on the right side of management by ticking whatever boxes management tells us to tick this week. I can tell you with absolute surety, it has resulted in a decline in standards, not a rise. It’s typical Blair stuff – you make people miserable by imposing all this on them, you dumb down standards, you take people’s power to control the way they do things away from them, you make people scared that if they do things a bit different if they aren’t sucking up to management they;ll be sacked, you turn them into cogs in the machinery. And because more of the boxes you have set up as part of all of this get ticked, you claim there has been an improvement in performance.
Everyone I know who works in universities says the same – it used to be a job we REALLY enjoyed and felt privileged to do, we loved going to work and doing it. No more. We feel stressed all the time, so much of what made this such a great job has been taken away. All in the name of “efficiency”, “improving standards” and above all “making the university more businesslike”. And all achieving the exact opposite (except perhaps the “businesslike” bit).
The rise in the pay of university heads, while staff lower down are seeing no such pay rise, only their job security taken away, pensions threatened, and more stress as targets are imposed and you are threatened with being “performance managed out” if you don’t meet them, is all part of making universities more “businesslike”. And you say the “reforming zeal” which I take it means much more of this, because it certainly has whenever words and attitudes like yours have been aired in the past, has not “so far – really touched the university sector”.
Yours is the most depressing article I have EVER read in Liberal Democrat Voice. And you know I’ve disagreed vehemently with a lot that has been written here in the past. If what you write is what is now our party’s opinion, I resign – it means our party stands for all I used to think it was against.
Nigel Rogers, I think you misunderstand me.
@g hopefully you will not take ill if you are ever in North America otherwise you will be treated by doctors with an “iffy” medical qualification…….not sure how the those world leading private medical schools e.g. Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins et al would view you comment….probably with derision
The Buckingham MD is not the equivalent of the North American MD, rather the UK MB, MBBS, MBChB, BM and BCh qualifications are. Buckingham does not offer these. The use of MD by Buckingham for a postgrad qualification is highly unusual, if not unique, and may, I stress may, be engendered to confuse. I think this is possibly why you may have misinterpreted my comment.
Just to make things clear, the 2009-10 and 2010-11 academic years are still under the old system of financing for Universities, and they have had to serious funding cuts. Most academic salaries were frozen and the inflation adjustment negotiated nationally was something like 0.5%. There have also been major redundancies across the sector. For the Vice-Chancellors to take 10% salary rises in this context is quite scandalous.
Mark’s title is misleading in that it suggests that there have been massive pay rises across the University sector. In reality, it is only the Vice-Chancellors’ salaries that went up, not that of general staff.
@Henry
Isn’t that a rather threatening tone? You know a Lib Dem majority would scrap fees, and you know that Labour would have followed through the Browne Review which they set up. Almost all your comments should instead be directed at the Labour leadership and Conservative party to try and persuade them to agree with our party policy.*
Absurd. How can you possibly scrap fees after voting to treble them? You’ve alienated massive chunks of the HE sector with your actions! Having the effontry to say that should enough people vote for you you would go back on a policy you promised to vote against in the first place is pathetic. You’ve made your bed, lie in it.
Uday Reddy
Mark’s title is misleading in that it suggests that there have been massive pay rises across the University sector. In reality, it is only the Vice-Chancellors’ salaries that went up, not that of general staff.
The Daily Telegraph has put a different headline on the web-article from Mark’s link to the one that was in the printed newspaper on Saturday. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something like “University pay goes up by 20%”. This was the main article on the front page of the newspaper, what anyone who saw the paper but did not buy it would see. Or anyone who bought the paper but did not read the article carefully. Only if you read the article would you see that it refers only to the pay of one or two employees in each university (the bloke at the top and maybe his deputies). I.e. over 99.9% of us who work in universities have NOT had this 20% pay increase, despite what anyone who just saw this headline would suppose. The pay settlement for 2010/11 was a 0.4% increase.
I know this because on Sunday I was in conversation with a friend, talking about the pressure and financial worries my wife (a highly skilled senior university administrator, unemployed for two years thanks to the cuts) and I face, and he said “But aren’t you getting a 20% pay increase?”. He genuinely believed I was, “I read it in the newspaper” he said. In the end, after I had expressed astonishment and said I certainly wasn’t receiving anything like that, he said “Look, I’ll find that newspaper”, and he did, and I was able to point out the smallprint where it said it was “University vice-chancellors” getting the 20% pay increase, not the rest of us who work in universities.