ROW EXPLODES OVER VICE-CHANCELLORS’ SOARING SALARIES
The vice-chancellor of Oxford University has angrily denied that your tuition fees are being used to fund soaring executive salaries within higher education institutions, claiming wages for senior positions are in line with the “global marketplace” and are even higher in the United States. The Oxford exec’s own salary is £350,000 per year.
Speaking at the Times Higher Education’s world academic summit on Monday, Professor Louise Richardson insisted tuition fee rises were introduced to make up for shrinking public subsidy and there was no link between the growth in fees and the growth in the salaries of senior university executives, some of whom earn up to £451,000 per year.
In recent weeks, politicians and the media have raised increasingly awkward questions about the normalisation of private-sector style ‘fat cat’ pay levels in the university sector, where those at the top appear to receive disproportionately higher salaries than those below them, including lecturers, tutors, researchers and other junior academic staff.
But Richardson insisted the anger directed at her and senior colleagues was unfair, saying:
“We have been getting a rough ride lately, and certainly some mendacious media and tawdry politicians seem determined to do their utmost to damage one of the most successful — and globally admired — sectors of the British economy.”
After pointing out that some American university bosses earn up to £1.5m per year, she added:
“I think this is just the politicians, and I wish they wouldn’t do it, not because it’s embarrassing for me or my colleagues but because it’s damaging.
“Why would you want to try and damage what is one of the most successful aspects of the British economy? The calibre of university education is something that should be celebrated on a daily basis – not just trying to drag it down by making spurious correlations between fees and salaries.”
DOING NICELY: Professor Louise Richardson insists her £350,000 salary isn’t excessive
Richardson’s comments come a few months after the University and College Union (UCU), which represents academics, said the latest available figures showed the average salary for a university vice-chancellor in the UK was 6.5 times that of the average member of staff at their institution and the former’s pay had grown faster than that for academics in recent years. The UCU’s general secretary, Sally Hunt, said:
“Soaring senior pay in UK universities has long been an embarrassment for the sector, and previous calls for restraint have fallen on deaf ears.”
Richardson did not name the specific politicians or media outlets she was criticising. But the universities minister, Jo Johnson, and the former Labour minister Lord Adonis — both Oxford University graduates — have been vocal in their concern about the issue.
And criticism followed comments by Nick Timothy, a former aide to the Prime Minister, who last month slammed “the university gravy train” and denounced tuition fees as “an unsustainable Ponzi [pyramid] scheme”.
In an article for The Daily Telegraph, Timothy wrote:
“Tuition fees were supposed to make university funding fairer for the taxpayer, but more than three quarters of graduates will never pay back their debts. We have created an unsustainable and ultimately pointless Ponzi scheme, and young people know it. With average debts of £50,000, graduates in England are the most indebted in the developed world.”
Universities have been warned that greater transparency over senior pay levels is essential if they are to maintain the trust of the rest of their staff, students and graduates. Particularly as, given their age, none of these executives will have paid a penny for their own undergraduate degree.
* SHOULD UNIVERSITY BOSSES HAVE THEIR SALARIES CUT?
What do you think of Professor Richardson’s comments? Do you believe her claim that your tuition fees aren’t funding senior university executives’ salaries?
Not really…however, in the scheme of things, some of the Former Polytechnics have been guilty of aggressively increasing their tuition fees to meet the level of the Russel Group Universities in the belief that to do otherwise would devalue the education provided.
No.
And anyway, a salary of over £12k net a month in a country where about half the population is on less then c £25k a year, regardless of where it comes from, is outrageous, not the kind of pay differential common only a few decades ago, and simply saying “tu quoque” at even more filthy rich people whose income isn’t predominantly from public funds doesn’t change that.
This is also happening as lecturers are being casaulised and paid less and less in real terms after having to shell out thousands in postgrad fees to become lecturers in the first place.
Maybe Oxford has other sources of funding – commercial? donors? – for executive pay, but is it seriously being suggested that tution fees, hall of residence rents paid by maintenance loans, the scholarships of foreign governments and other forms of public funds aren’t in general in other unis going towards executive pay?
Where else is it coming from?
An insider from a London university has told us the following, which he has allowed us to post on his behalf:
“University tuition fees go on many more things than Vice-Chancellor’s salaries! Universities are complex organisations with turnovers into the 100s of millions if not billions. They employ thousands of staff and not just academics. Tuition fees pay for Libraries, IT, learning resources, buildings (estates some of which are historic!) and to an extent different subjects Cross-subsidise each other. The Humanities have long subsidised the Sciences. Some of this comes direct from the Government but it has been less & less over the years. International tuition fees as well as aspects of research funding from the U.K. Or Overseas Governments & business often plug the gap.”
What are people’s thoughts?
Having followed this over the last few days, what strikes me is how fast students’ trust in their institutions is evaporating – probably because there was lurking dissatisfaction there already. What’s also remarkable is how universities official channels, and their senior people, seem not to have understood that this is a huge issue for them, and one that will not go away. Has anyone actually said ‘Sorry’ yet, or ‘We’ll look into it as we agree it’s not right’? Because I haven’t heard it…
The whole thing is painfully reminiscent of the fat cat pay row in the private sector, where senior people have continued to justify their own inflated salaries through complicated arguments and reasoning, not realising that this is all about the big picture, and the more they think they are justifying their salary, the more ridiculous and out of touch they look.
Nobody cares which ‘pot’ their salary, pension, bonus, free accommodation, travel expenses etc comes out of! Students can’t choose where exactly their 9 grand goes, so why should they care? To them, it’s all one pot, and it’s a simple fact that the VCs are taking way too much out.
This came in to me via email, from a contact happy to be credited as ‘an insider from a London university’. Interesting, I thought…
“University tuition fees go on many more things than Vice-Chancellor’s salaries! Universities are complex organisations with turnovers into the 100s of millions if not billions. They employ thousands of staff and not just academics. Tuition fees pay for Libraries, IT, learning resources, buildings (estates some of which are historic!) and to an extent different subjects Cross-subsidise each other. The Humanities have long subsidised the Sciences. Some of this comes direct from the Government but it has been less & less over the years. International tuition fees as well as aspects of research funding from the U.K. Or Overseas Governments & business often plug the gap.”
Thoughts?
Unpaid internships risk demonstrating a complete lack of self-respect to potential employers. If you don’t value yourself why would anyone else?
When I was younger I just didn’t appreciate the long-term damage that results from graduating into a recession.
I have just logged into HMRC to see the damage that the recession did to my NI record. It is very sobering. I’m going to make a voluntary payment of £360 which will get me from 6 to 8 qualifying years for the state pension. I am too embarrassed to say how many non-qualifying years there are. I spent far too long in Higher Education essentially handing over tuition fee money to prop up overly generous final salary schemes for some of my lecturers.
Ditto. I believe I have 8 or 9 NI qualifying years. Some years are cheap to buy out (around £150 or so… probably when I was claiming JSA) and some are upwards of £800-1000 (likely when I was in university). To be honest, it doesn’t worry me much at the moment for various reasons. I have time and savings to make up the 35 years… but who is to say the state pension will exist in 40 years time and what form it will take? Also, the max state pension (35 qualifying years is £168 and the basic rate is around £129). Both are a pittance. Lastly I just finished an MSc and I’m looking at options abroad.
I’ve now reached a point where the recession is very much something in my rear view mirror.
1. After three years of continuous employment my CV is in a good place. The stigma of being unemployed is no longer a feature of interviews. Employers do not really care what I was doing in 2015/16. Three years of industry experience gives me a credibility at interview that was simply lacking after graduation.
2. Savings have improved dramatically. I could now get a mortgage in Wales and Scotland according to a BBC affordability calculator. Also most of England north of the The Wash and the Bristol Channel.
3. However, to use a golf analogy, neither my current state or workplace pension contributions are currently at a par score for my age. I think I could do with buying out another couple of NI years. I’d love to start making additional workplace pension contributions as well but adding to the house deposit fund seems more appropriate at this stage of my life.
I wouldn’t have believed I could be in this position say 5 or 6 years ago. I suppose it is best to laugh at the 2013 incident captured by Graduate Fog where I was asked to bleach a toilet where the chain had ceased to work. It was actually a supposedly prestigious internship in the political field (!!!). I imagined I would be dealing with important politicians. This was not the case and my abiding memory of that internship is yellow urine that would not flush.
https://twitter.com/GraduateFog/status/512568019583643650