AIBU to think university executives should not be paid so much that the uni can't afford lecturers

The thing is, everyone at my institution moans about the same things. Overworked, underpaid, can't take leave and so on. I don't have a cushy research grant and I typically have 10-15 hours a week teaching during term time.

Nonetheless, my experience of HE, and I came into it after having worked some pretty crappy jobs, is that people don't realise how lucky they are. It's the easiest and most enjoyable job I've had by some distance.

Some support staff salaries are also ridiculously inflated.

And the fees unis can charge are much less! Typically £22k for the degree rather than £30k. And 20% of that is held back till they’ve completed the (unrelated to degree) end point assessment.

@MickyMoonshine Whoever does the work, there’s a cost to it!!! They simply are more costly than a standard degree in terms of setting up and liaison.

Degree Apprenticeships are a fantastic option for students. However the wider bureaucratic load involved in apprenticeships
(which at my place is almost wholly shouldered by academics) is ridiculous and adds nothing that might benefit students or employers. There are a whole separate set of apprenticeship standards that need to be met over and above the awarding of a degree. Meeting these requirements sucks time and resources not particularly commensurate with the fees paid. I think universities will move away from this provision more and more

Yeah they are bureaucracy heavy so you need big numbers to make them worth it. My department has two very big ones which work well but we’ve decided against running smaller ones because we know we won’t get huge numbers.

There are definitely ways in which they could be more efficient but that’s out of our hands.

We’re dropping our apprenticeships apparently as although they are popular they cost too much to run. Too many meetings and paperwork 🤷‍♀️. No idea as I’m not involved with them.

I work at a university and run a department that offers degree apprenticeships. They’re one of our few growth areas so they’re worth the additional admin.
At my university there are only a very small number of staff who solely work on apprenticeship administration. The bulk of the set up and validation work is done by an academic and once they’re set up they’re managed like any other course and are looked after by the general course admin staff.

@MickyMoonshine I was referring to the vast amount of admin needed to set the degrees up. They are a departure from full time degrees and are more employer driven. They are undoubtedly top heavy in additional admin costs! When I was doing a part time qualification at a now uni (poly) we learnt what the poly provided. Now it’s not like that and it costs.

Staff teaching on degree apprenticeships are ‘lecturing’. It’s the same staff who teach on the standard degrees!

Lecturers and academic staff often lead academic adjacent initiatives too.

In 2924, wonkhe said only 2 were over £400,000, so who has had the stonking rises since then? Most are not £400,000.

The issue is probably the tiers below and sheer numbers of managers. That’s most likely the staffing areas that need trimming. However with all the Sen, mental heath and other new initiatives such as degrees for apprentices, diversity and social equality, is there any wonder staff numbers have exploded. None of it is actually lecturing!

I am an an academic and we can't afford the lowest rung new hire academic posts yet the top brass is on over £400k. It's infuriating.

I think we should be looking at procurement and resourcing - so much money wasted there. Middle management too. I don't like our VC but I acknowledge she earns her salary.

I work in a university library, we are officially on a hiring freeze and "informal restructure" which basically means changing terms so that people are forced out. There was a push for ages to have libraries open 24/7 so we have staff employed out of 9-5 core hours, now they want to unstaff at these times so those colleagues have to take core hours reshuffling or leave. We are completely at the whims of senior leadership who'll have a different plan in 2 years time, I guarantee.

Student facing staff are also massively undervalued here, they're basically pretty openly planning to replace library desks with faq kiosks in the near future. If you'd like your 18 year old studying in a 1000 seat building with 1 security guard on the front desk to cover 3 floors, no practical support for academic issues or emotional support when they're panicking about a deadline, then send them to a red brick UK uni because that's what libraries look like now.

Having worked in a university finance department I wholeheartedly disagree with you OP. The VC are the heads of incredibly complex organisations with lots of different demands on funding and tenuous funding. It’s an unbelievablely hard job. They earn every penny. Lecturers an are poorly paid for their qualifications and thevSTEM lecturers could walk into highly paid roles elsewhere. But if you’re a lecturer in medieval poetry be glad of the job. Theres no other way for you to be paid to indulge in a hobby.

I found the UCU whiners really tiresome. Always bitching about the grace and favour house the VC lived in ‘we’re paying for his heating etc’ totally overlooking the fact that the property is used for hosting functions and meeting held by the VC to promote the Uni. It’s like expecting the PM to pay the council tax on Downing Street. And then there’s all of the misogynistic trans shite they spout.

I feel for good lecturers losing their job, but members of the UCU brought it on themselves, asking for endless pay rises when income of the uni wasn’t rising, kicking back when the uni was looking to trim the totally unaffordable pension liability. Money doesn’t grow on trees. If you won’t let them cut pay or pensions is has to be jobs you ignorant fools.

I left the uni because the pay was so bad for a professional services role - about half the market rate - I couldn’t afford to act as a charity any longer.

This is a really great article. It's long, because it recognises the many complexities of the system and how it's changed over time.
The idea that you can just pay VCs less and it'll all be fixed is bizarre.

@UEAStaff None of those nursing attributes shout degree to me! They are training matters for the right recruits. How on earth did nurses manage in the 80? The nurses are not better - they are the same people who didn’t do degrees when 20% went to uni. Now it’s 37% and nurses are part of the 17%. They aren’t better or brighter! They are the same group of people.

Patient outcomes improve due to new drugs and new methods and research. Nursing has just moved away from patient care, as the list of duties clearly demonstrates! Most of us don’t think care is great! It’s a conveyor belt of mediocrity. Mainly because patients are data and the NHS is poorly run.

Are you happy to share which institution this is? I need to move there!

At mine it is very difficult to get promoted up to Senior Lecturer, never mind higher than that.

We get 42 days holiday in total. But a lot of people cannot take that amount because there is too much work to do.

It is true we have a lot of freedom and flexibility, which is great.

However it would be rare for me to get a whole day to focus on research during term time. There’s simply too much else going on. Same during assessment periods, there’s such a time crunch and tight turnarounds. That seems to be a common trend among my colleagues, including those I’d consider very high performing, and it’s across universities, so it indicates something about workloads and the increased demands on academics’ time from things that are not research. Sure, we have more time in the summer for example, but in my experience there’s significant parts of the year where most academics are not getting much substantial research done due to other demands. And even the summer research period is gradually shrinking due to things like admissions work, resits, supervising Master’s dissertations, summer schools, and ongoing pastoral care issues.

Nope. Top of lecturer scale is 47k. Top of senior lecturer scale is 56.5k but it’s not always possible anymore to get moved up to SL. Like I said earlier I know module leads and even a programme lead who are lecturer and keep getting the SL carrot dangled but it doesn’t happen. They take on more and more school wide responsibilities in a desperate attempt.

Where I work there is no promotion to Associate Prof. there are a few positions in the school but you have to wait for a vacancy and apply. They’ve gone from about 9 associate profs to 4 in the last round of cuts. Their work obviously still needs doing, they’ve just asked for expressions of interest for one workload as a two person job share but made it clear it would be at your normal wage of lecturer/senior lecturer…..oh and there would be no back fill for the other half of your job. So basically you’d have to do your normal job in three days a week not 5 and half of someone else’s job in two days and get no more money for that 😆😆😆

and I have no time to focus on research. I doubt I do 1.5 days a year never mind a week. Sadly the course admin and teaching takes up 5 days a week due to slashing the number of lecturers on the programme.

All organisations need to be run efficiently.

In the public sector (and the HE sector) very few are.

It is a recurrent theme through all publically funded organisations that they are thickly resourced in well paid management roles (NHS I am looking at you too!) but under resourced on the front line.

This inherent problem is exacerbated when cuts are required as the most common response is to cut the front line because managers will never cut themselves.

I estimate that the public sector is 50pc over resourced in management compared to the private sector. There are huge efficiency gains to be made here.

In contrast public services are unnecessarily stretched on the front line. I guess in HE then lecturers are the equivalent of the front line.

That's the starting salary. Lecturers have a further 9/10 grades to increment through up to about £59k. Then another five if they are promoted to Reader/Associate Professor, which they ought to be if they are high performing.

There is still significant freedom as an academic and a high performing researcher should have 1 to 1.5 days to focus on research.

People who want to become old fashioned style nurses can still follow a career path being "nursing assistants" and HCAs, etc. But if someone could get into a prescribing and treatment-decision role with lots of record keeping, digital record keeping, constant training & supervising others, they need Uni degrees. Modern health care is complicated and needs academic skills, this isn't the 1950s.

Annoys me that people devalue modern nursing jobs by implying they don't take a lot of brains, excellent numeracy, holistic thinking & literacy training.

Name changed for this. I work at Northumbria Uni in professional services and it’s an absolute shit show.

Patient outcomes have improved since nursing became a degree entry route.