Senior University Lecturer salary - shocked!

Agreed! I'm a Grade 9 Professional Services person. I have an MA(Hons) - Scottish UG degree from an Ancient Uni; an MSc; and a PhD. I fell into Academic Administration (as many of us do), liked it, and am really bloody good at it. I now take home only about £120 more than I did when first appointed to Grade 9, about 10 years ago. There's no bonuses for us, unless you get your £500 'excellent performance' award, which takes forever to apply for/be awarded. Oh, and it's also taxed!

The money in Universities isn't in academic or regular professional services roles; it's in the Senior Management, where, for example, my Uni's Principal earns just over £400k a year, and gets a free house to stay in.

It might vary by discipline, but when I was a student at uni (sciences) most of the lecturers spent their time doing research and only did a few hours a week of actual teaching. They pay's not that bad if you get to spend most of your time studying a subject you're really interested in, almost like being paid to pursue a hobby.

😂 no, we do not get bonuses. We do get paid time off at Christmas and Easter though and a lot of work-life flexibility.

That said, lecturing is not just teaching. Actually, we spend fairly little time teaching. A lot of it is pastoral care with students, admin work, chairing committees, writing for publication, attending conferences (and organising them), supervising student dissertations and PhD research, and running research grants, including managing huge budgets. I don’t know anyone in academia who works 9-5. Everyone works evenings, weekends, my line manager fills her time when she is away on holiday with her family with meetings.

Honestly, a PhD and 20 years in academia and I’m leaving. Lots of colleagues up and left long ago and I never thought I would. But a life changing illness and I decided that I wanted more out of life than to be trapped on this treadmill.

Better than it used to be. To be honest it was fine outside of London bringing up a family, but we didn't take the offer of a position in London because the uplift was only £6k

Bonuses? Hard lol! I'm not saying that being a senior lecturer is the equivalent of working down a mine but it's akin to working in any other low-paid public sector org. No bonuses, workload increasing year-on-year, do more with less and don't expect any praise or recognition.

Academic salaries are dire in the UK. I’m in Australia and they are much better.

My perception is that academics traditionally gave off an old money vibe and perhaps that’s where the assumption has come from.

Well, depending on his field & discipline, he'll be dissuaded by it taking 5-7 years for him to land even a fixed-term contract. We're losing a generation of excellent smart scholars & researchers.

And you get called Professor regardless of whether you actually have a Chair!

No, for the amount of study involved, university lecturers are truely one of the lowest paid and yet they are one of the hardest jobs to get.

🤣Bonuses?!?🤣

No. Nor are there overtime payments.

As for workload? My DP teaches undergrads and MA students and supervises PhDs - lectures, seminars, marking exams and essays, endless meetings about marking and plagiarism questions (a lot of the marking is at weekends, marking and exam boards take up a big chunk of the summer 'break') and course conent; he is the academic advisor for 700 students; and he's also expected to meet research and funding targets, go to conferences, write books and papers, take part in public engagement activities, go to open days (usually Saturdays) ...

Incidentally, those books - which if they are academic texbooks can easily sell for £50+ each - he gets paid about £100 for. Or he can take twice the value of books instead of the cash.

Readers are at Grade 8 where I work, only Professors are Grade 9. And once you're a Professor it's almost impossible to get any salary increments; only 1 out of 10 of them in my university are given an annual increment, they're all pitted against each other in the annual review process.

It is in the US

Ha ha ha ha Bonuses!!!!!!

I'm a fairly senior professor and it's taken me around 35 years of 60 hour weeks, and several big (ie over half a million) research grants to get to a salary almost within the magic "6 figures" And I remember when I was promoted to Senior Lecturer, my salary was the same as the salary my friend's PA received (City law firm).

It used to be that the Senior Lecturer mid-range salary tracked against a backbench MP's salary, as a rough guide. Now it's about a half to two-thirds.

We pay risible salaries to some of the best researchers and teachers in the world.

Have a look at entry-level Lecturer posts: they are a bit more than the salary a newly qualified school teacher gets, but a new university Lecturer will have several more degrees, publications, expertise & teaching experience than a school teacher.

This is why academics have been participating in a long drawn out attempt to get their salaries somewhere equivalent to other highly qualified expert professionals.

Er, out of interest OP, what do you do?

Sincerely,
Works in the arts and has never earned over £45k despite two top degrees and 15 years experience

I'm only surprised there are any posts in HE being advertised at all. The whole system is in free fall and I'm aware compulsory redundancy is coming down the track in many universities.

Pay rises have been derisory and given inflation have amounted to real-term pay cuts for around the past fifteen years.

Lecturers are the lowest-paid in Europe and earn a pittance compared with colleagues in the US. They're also treated extremely poorly.

There’s fuck all to be made in academia. I have a doctorate and have managed to engineer myself into a corporate role with excellent remuneration. But it was hard. And I had to leave a lot of my own personal ideals and ethics at the door.

I think it's a labour of love.

He has been under investigation for nearly a year, but still employed by the university. It is all coming out now, so we will wait and see what happens.

@BarbaraHoward @CastleTower Perhaps based on my own uni lecturers and a friend who, although isn’t super smart, always looks very clean and has great quality clothes and hand knits. I did go to an arts uni so maybe the proportion of lecturers floating around in Toast and corduroy was higher than some other unis.

My DH (retired academic) always used to joke that there was a negative dress code at his university!

I have a PhD and have worked in Universities for 20 years. My family have always assumed I must be loaded despite me never saying that or suggesting I am well off. My salary is decent (£45k ish), plenty to live on while not being extravagant. I'm not a lecturer but I am in the academic/research job family. There are no bonuses. My current Uni has a reward scheme in which you might get a small amount as a voucher or bank transfer if someone nominates you for doing outstanding work.

The perks lie in the other benefits. The culture in my current workplace is good, flexible working is normal, annual leave allowance is great, it's quite inclusive of people from all walks of life, sick pay and maternity pay is excellent. Opportunities for blue sky thinking are vast. I feel like the work I do is genuinely worthwhile and I'm not just slaving away to make millionaires and billionaires even richer. Some things are worth more than money, so as long as I have enough to live comfortably on I can't see me leaving for more money.

I also got this (£48/hour) to lecture in Art at a post-92 last year. You had to work 2 unpaid hours for every paid one, so £16/hour really.

Visiting lecturers get paid a decent hourly rate - my husband guest lectures and gets around £80 per hour for a few hours each month on top of his full time job.

The uni's do sometimes take the piss though and pay him got less hours than he does, keep him waiting around, take forever to pay him, so it's not really worth it.

Dh uncle is a prof. He seems to actually work very few hours. He lectures about 4 hours a week on stuff he's done for donkeys years, he doesnt prep a lot. He then does 3 smaller group things, supervises a couple of dissertations (these seem to take little time - couple of hours a term) and has 2 phd candidates. He tinkers around writing his own material in between and gets royalties from book sales. He takes very long vacations