Vice chancellors pay - the only way is up

FoI requests show Vice Chancellors have had another year of inflation busting pay rises...

http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7870/transparency_at_the_top_2016/pdf/VC_pay_and_perks_FINAL_VERSION21.pdf

Clearly HE leadership has been excellent across the board again... hooray :wink:

Reply 1

Satanas

Original post by Joinedup

dude its a 75 page document, tl;dr.

please post the key info.

Reply 2

user382

Best job in the world. :tongue:

Reply 3

MagicNMedicine

Something is odd in the pay structure of HE institutions, especially the established ones.

If you are on the academic side, the pay and job security is low. You have to do a PhD and work for many years on low pay and short term contracts while you try to get published and it's a very ruthlessly competitive world. If you make it to lecturer the pay might be say £38k to £45k which is decent and professor might be £55k to £70k for example but those are salaries that you could be looking to get after say 3 years and 6-8 years respectively on many professional graduate schemes.

On the other hand, the administration side of HE is quite well paid. In fact I think it's one of the big secret careers for graduates because nobody really talks about it. Often graduates stumble in to this: they can't get a grad job and get an admin job in one of their university offices, and if they are good, they get promoted and they can get some quite interesting jobs. Possibly the best one to have is as an international office manager, where you'll get a healthy salary and paid to travel all around the world promoting your institution, but there are also other jobs involved with the strategic direction of a university which will pay £50k plus and have quite good terms and conditions. Also there are universities all over the country and so you can move about where you want.

At the top end, pay for senior managers in HE does raise eyebrows. For all the criticism that the civil service gets, the big hitters in universities get a lot more than senior civil service and don't have nearly the size of operation to manage, the importance and the pressure of accountability that senior civil servants do.

I also think it doesn't help the sector in terms of its relationship with government when these highly paid vice-chancellors come pleading poverty to government with their stories of a sector at breaking point due to being starved from funds whilst simultaneously awarding themselves huge pay rises and advertising on their websites and in glossy brochures the great investment in buildings, swimming pools and other facilities that their university is currently doing.