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

I agree re Nursing (and other AHPs). I’d have a scheme of loan forgiveness in return for x years working in the NHS.

PGCE is already free, and comes with a bursary in the shortage subjects which is reasonable.

If teaching and nursing weren’t degrees though, it would be mainly boys that went to uni. I don’t think many of us would like that! Plus it puts those professions on a more respected footing.

@shortsaint stem subjects are an education. They are not all vocational. Some subjects like law lead to jobs in law for some and are a pre qualification. The whole point of a degree is knowledge and skills. Many employers won’t care too much about the knowledge the student has on the novels of Emily Brontë, but will care about transferable skills and ability to be a good employee.

And my personal beef is why does nursing and so on need a degree. These people go on to an underpaid public sector job and are penalised for it. Same with PGCEs, or even Medicine (though I am interested in the previous post about doctors salaries skewing the salary rates of science grads)

I didn’t express myself well. Of course STEM is important but so are humanities and social sciences, and, as other people have said, these are cheaper to teach. It needs to be balanced. A University is there to provide an education not just give a qualification.

nor is the University of Exeter in any financial trouble

I've heard very much to the contrary since years ago.
People who manage large complicated budgets should be well paid, imho.

Governments capped tuition fees too low for years. That was a big mistake.

The thing is, these are hugely popular departments and it isn’t a case of unpopularity. These fees paid for these humanities subject fund the science degrees which cost far more to run and yet cannot be elevated in cost in terms of student fees. The Humanities at Exeter are profitable, not only in terms of the popularity of the degrees but also the fact that the ranking and research money coming into the university also stem - significantly - from here. The redundancies are already recognised as being awfully ill judged and yet, it appears it’s still full steam ahead.

Thank you @TurbulentPriest It's been a wild ride for sure. I've been a charity trustee myself. I'm sure had I mismanaged charity / public funds like that, I would have been in court by now over it.

You have my sympathies working at Dundee - a prime example of the utter failure of highly paid senior management, resulting in a government bailout. For those unfamiliar with this, google the Gillies report. Shocking.

Unfortunately universities make a loss on both teaching home undergraduate students and on most of their research. Tuition fees don’t cover the cost of delivering the course, and government-funded research grants only cover 80% of the full economic costs. Until recently, the shortfall was made up by charging top dollar to international students; but as other posters have said, government policy and the strengthening of universities in students’ home countries have put paid to that. The system is broken, and all universities apart from a handful with very deep pockets are having to cut costs to get back on a sustainable footing.

@shortsaint The need for research led universities of high calibre is not mad. They have attracted external students and investment and most countries have a premier league of unis. USA and France certainly do. We should not be different.

The huge mistake was over expansion and offering too many low level courses at low level universities. There was no objective need for this. At the same time, we destroyed the HE sector below degree level by chronic under investment. The unis are there to educate students, not bring money into university towns. That’s a by product. Some areas like Lincolnshire employ few Lincoln grads so the area is boasted by high salaries at the universities. Great for some but the overall population doesn’t benefit much.

What are you on about? The majority of provision isn’t private all - unis are charities. Research funding still largely comes from the Gov. via the Research Councils (obvs unis can bid for grants from other sources, charities, philanthropy etc), research has never paid full costs though.

Are you making some clever nuanced point or just ignorant about how HE (teaching and research) is funded. If the former can you explain.

I wouldn’t knock VC pay as they’re running multi million £ businesses with 1000s of staff… some of the Uni executives are certainly overpaid.

I’ve worked in HE for over 20 years and it is a shitshow.

They are guilty of complacency by certainly. They do live in ivory towers certainly. But they have also contributed an awful lot towards economic investment in the regions.

The fact is the UG courses do not cover their costs. They banked on international PG students (and lost).

the obsession with STEM is mad. The obsession with RG is stupid.

They grew too fast and now they have to cut. I just hope they survive overall.

Poor kids.

Clearly didn’t read. I said academic resources, and in fact their privatization is a part of the increase in costs. Crazy country. Research used to be paid for largely by government grants, so public money, then the universities were forced to buy back the results of that research and all forms of communicating them again. It’s all about making money for the rich. Thats all university is for nowadays. The degrees themselves are deliberately outsourced training, much of which used to be done in house much more cheaply. All to create more and more opportunities for private pockets to generate more and more profit for the few at the general public’s expense.

Well we can’t afford it any more, the country is nearly bankrupt and very few have the hundreds of thousands needed to pay for increased university fees. I realise that the central government and authoritarian private companies think they’ve destroyed all possibility of organisation among people but what they’ve really destroyed is the organisation of the nation. A future age of civilization will have to bring back guilds and other mechanisms to pass on knowledge because privatised universities have failed.

This is a useful infographic.

You think the 9k pays for one lecturer per course? And that’s all that’s needed? Apart from the fact the course will have multiple academic staff teaching across a range of modules you also need to pay for :

Course Admin ( making sure courses are running effectively, student records are correct, exa my s boards take place, degrees awarded etc)
Timetable team
Library ( staff, books, subscriptions)
IT (staff, equipment and licenses)
Estates and catering staff
Student finance team
careers and employability
Disability and well being
Academic support/study skills
international office
Marketing
Admissions
Registry
Research support

energy costs

It isn’t and never has been , just one person in a room talking. This things always needed to be paid for but the difference was the funding model.

Clearly have 0 idea of what that £9k pays for. It's not the lecturer's time. It's the subscriptions to all the academic journals, the building costs, the 'student experience', the careers service, the counselling and well-being services, the disability support, the estate management, the subscriptions to online systems to host and submit work.

Our department estamites a loss of £3.5k for every home student so our target is 80% international students. In a recent meeting our home student allocation was being described as essentially charitable towards the UK because we are located here. In ten years time we will probably be 95% international and people will wonder why UK a level students can't get places anywhere.

Fees pay so much more than the lecturers! Buliding maintenance, heating, lighting, the admin, subsidising research, finance department, HR department, library, all student services, student union, sport centre, food outlets, the labs, the specialist other teaching resources, student placements and the admin to support that and so it goes on.

This has been brewing since they privatised universities, and also privatised the academic resources required, and forced the use of computers to wipe people’s noses when they sneeze, not to mention using computers for no other reason than to look posh.

Everything in Britain is now fucked thanks to greed, the greed of those at the top.

The only thing you are unreasonable about is the old trope of ‘uni tuition fees don’t cover costs’. Something has gone so so wrong with basic economics in this country, everywhere. All you really need in many forms of education, and even in STEM education for some of the time, is a bunch of people in a room prepared to listen to one person prepared to talk about what they are doing. If a whole bunch of people in a lecture theatre paying 9k a time can’t cover the costs of that 1 person talking then everything is fucked. What else are they paying for? Funny how education used to be so much more affordable isn’t it.

This, absolutely.

Out of interest, I just checked for accuracy - it's actually 52 this year.

The issue with the Exeter is definitely not lack of demand

there are similar issues with other universities, but I've talked about them on other threads, so I won't bore on again

Some universities may have lack of demand problems. Exeter is definitely not one of them.

It's not a long term solution though. What talent can you attract with significantly lower salaries? US salaries are already hugely higher than UK academics' pay. We struggle to secure top US academics when they apply for our posts (and they'll be looking at £120k as profs in my discipline). Maintaining UK standing as a world leading nation providing excellent research institutions is tough if we can't get people who do world leading research to work in them.

I think you are being very reasonable. As the username indicates I'm at Dundee and currently on the possible might be made redundant list along with probably half the rest of the employees. We need to save £20million a year. If everyone on £100k plus took a 10% pay cut and those of us on £50k plus took at least a 5% cut it would go a long way to helping balance the books. Perhaps we should cap the highest salaries at £200k.
If UCU and other key unions got behind this and proposed it as a national solution, it might help a lot of unis who are cutting shop floor staff while the high hegions earn their £300k plus salaries.

I think we get 40 days holiday. But in 20 years of working in HE I have never taken more than Xmas day off and even then I've had students contacting me.

That’s astonishing! I’ve worked in several universities and talk to people from many others - you get far far far more holidays than most, and most do not have virtually automatic promotion to SL.