Senior University Lecturer salary - shocked!

[salary]

I've just seen an advert for the above position, at a nearby Uni. The salary is anywhere between £39k and £64k, based on whether it is filled by a grade 7, 8 or 9 person.

I am genuinely shocked at how low this salary is, for such a high profile role. Do they get huge bonuses or something?

Academics in science are in charge of the lives of their students. There was a student that died in a science lab in the states due to a predictable reaction between a chemical and air causing a fire and extensive burns to the student she died a painful death.
When I started my PhD I was told 1 in 10 of us would have to go to hospital during our PhD due to lab incidents, I would say this was probably a fair percentage. I know one person that had to go to a and E due to inhaling phosphine gas, another that lost part of his jaw due to exposure to a solvent when he had a tooth infection. Multiple broken glass injuries. On a daily basis I did a procedure that came with a significant risk of asphyxiation, handled chemicals that were fatal if inhaled, or swallowed or came in to contact with the skin. Risks of explosions, risks of fire if exposed to air. Teratogenic compounds.
My partner has a post doc who works late into the evening and at weekends despite his discouragement. There are often Saturdays where we can't go to bed because they are still in the lab and until they have messaged to say they have left as he has to be prepared to raise the alarm if they go longer than a set amount of time with out contacting him. He absolutely feels responsible for their health and their lives. In my lab the risk of injury or incident was so significant that we had to be within eye sight of another person when in the lab at all times and weren't allowed to work out of hours or on days when the safety and first aid teams weren't on staff.

There is another thread with salaries for newly qualified accountants - 60k is a normal salary apparently. I am in the NHS, about the most senior non management grade and with 25 years of experience, I am on significantly less than this. Yes, it is ridiculous that lecturers are paid so little. But shows where societies priorities are.

It is indeed. My DH came up with a process for cleaning up radioactivity that means nuclear waste is safe to handle after around 500 years rather than 100,000. Not very fashionable now but I expect the poor archeologists who dig it up in a few thousand years will be very grateful.

Why do you feel the need to belittle the work of primary teachers to make your point? Primary teachers do a large number of things that university academics would not be able to do. It may not sound as lofty as producing research papers but it is work that is extremely valuable to society.

Yes agreed, arguably more important to society.

Teachers get such a hard time on here.

For all those who are saying they are overworked, and listing long lists of responsibilities, I completely hear and respect you. HOWEVER there are a lot of work shy lecturers in senior positions who do the minimum possible.

Actual things I've seen:

Second marking - read the first sentence click next approximate time to second mark one paper 20 seconds. Leave a comment occasionally so it looks like you've done work

Department meetings - 'attend' via teams, make zero contributions, do whatever you want whilst meeting is taking place...like head out to play golf?

Course planning - update name of prime minister on slides so it's relevant keep everything else the same as previous year.

Exam marking - a LOT of work, but done during the summer so don't need to be on campus and no teaching responsibilities

PhD students - currently supervising 2 students, one is dropping out. Drops them and email every few weeks to see how they are getting on.

1 to 1s with students 10 x 10 minutes appointments twice a year

On campus 2 1/2 days a week for teaching and seminars

Admin tasks - just doesn't do them. Hes been there so long that he is 'untouchable'

Outside of work does media appearances, has published numerous books (some with upfront payment from publisher), many editions of the same book with a few tweaks (so minimum work max payoffs), plays an obscene amount of time playing golf during the working week.

Salary 50k.

I think it really depends on the university and where you are in your career. One person's experience doesn't reflect all senior lecturers. Some are hardworking, inspiring people who care about their students and work long hours. Others are work shy and do the bare minimum, just like in any profession.

Overall I believe everyone in the education sector is underpaid. And more need Sto be done to weed out the twerps that gives the profession a bad name.

*I have strong opinions on this and am massively biased so I do apologise if I offended anyone.

In the mid 60s my Dad left being a small village school head to be a lecturer at a teacher training college.

Quite a jump in salary. Even more so when he became a senior lecturer.

Not so now. More like halving your wage.

Same moving from being a school teacher to working in a 6th form college. Less job security too.

@HEMole That's not quite true. The pay spine is national, yes, but each university puts their grades in different places on it. The differences were agreed in the 1990s. They can also have wider or narrower bands for each grade. It varies quite a bit.

Universities are always being disingenuous when they say "it's a national pay scale and we can't raise pay locally". They absolutely can - by adjusting their pay bands.

Watching from the outside...I think the lack of even basic level jobs with security is terrible. The part time part of the year staff work so hard, but very difficult to stay for several years, especially if the place you have been working cuts your job and you have to move elsewhere.
My dh has done some eu work over the years...not paid extra but given time off to travel. This was his main perk.
Mil still doesn't believe he has 6 months off a year and didn't retire at 60.

I am an associate prof on 70k but I also work in London and am in my mid-40s. For the three degrees and professional experience is seems insanely low. However, the head of my kid's primary is in 67k which seems even more insanely low......the UK salaries for non-city jobs are just ridiculously low.

Agreed.... Starting to wonder if we work at the same place, especially given the terminology you've used.

There seems to be a Vice Dean for everything these days too, and they're never in!

However, I also now do the bare minimum that I can get away with. It's probably not the nicest thing to say but I simply don't get paid enough in London to work crazy hours. A lot of academic work is basically doing people favours and doing things for free. I used to do it when I was paid double my current salary on the continent but it doesn't seem worth it. Perhaps people do think that I don't pull my weight as much as I should. But I won't do that for this wage. I do my job or what counts on the appraisal, take the flexibility and live the rest of my life.

Current post docs in 2024 are on around £31k. Good luck buying a house with that!

I was a problematic mortgagee because of my low pay and temporary contract. Thankfully, my dh has an industry job and we could buy through him. He got a 2:2 in a fairly useless degree. I have 3 degrees, one of which was award-winningly highly graded.

I am now in a permanent post but my life is bankrolled by my dh. We live in an expensive part of the country and I couldn’t afford rent, bills, and childcare on my income alone. If we divorced, I would be fucked if my dh insisted on paying the minimum or we had 50:50 shared care so no child support. Fortunately, we aren’t likely to divorce, but imagine if he became abusive or an alcoholic - I would be trapped.

In no career are you rewarded for loyalty to your institution. The great thing about the academic life is the mobility: if you're good you can move to any country and increase your salary. Do you think Sir Demis Hassabis is on £55k?

@marmite2023 I totally agree. Can you imagine going looking for a mortgage with a three year fellowship?
In the end we had to move because after 3 postdocs dh got a permanent post. At 35. I think only one of his postdocs has managed a permanent post at 35.
I had a permanent job at 21, my kids had permanent jobs at 22. Academic work is precarious.

😂😂 trust me, it's not.

There is no mobility! I’ve been commuting to my post 90 miles away for 8 years. I have endlessly looked for jobs and there are none. I cannot move abroad because my dh works where he does. I have found maybe 3 jobs that are in my field in the last 5 years, all at institutions more than 90 miles from home. There are lots of temporary posts in my field, but few permanent ones with seniority. We supply an essential educational field too so it’s important that my discipline continues.

When I went on maternity leave (aged 38, because I have only just got into a position that is permanent and done my time to qualify for Mat leave), we had 40 applicants for my cover, which was 6 months pro-rata’d at 50%. So worth about £7.5k for the 6 months. We had people with PhDs from Cambridge and massive track records in publishing and teaching applying for the post. It was shocking.

Oh and my field Looks the same in the US and Australia. Almost no permanent posts and massive oversupply leading to huge numbers of applications for a single post.

Pay has massively eroded over the last few years, but unlike other parts of the public sector (which barely got compensation either, don’t get me wrong), universities aren’t seen as needing as much support, so public money got frozen over that time. Yet, unlike businesses, we can’t just raise the costs because we don’t control fees (and in Scotland it’s free so no additional fee money). So, we’re in between a rock and a hard place.

To put it in context, I’ve gone up about six bands of pay from bottom to top of SL role over the last six years and I am worse off now than when I started. It’s pretty depressing to be honest. It took ten years of training to get here and over my career I’ve earned more than 700K of research money over that time (which is excellent for my field). To become a senior lecturer you also need to show that you are an international expert on your topic (and increasingly so as you go to higher levels eg reader or prof). Teaching is only 40% of my role so students or parents see very little of what we do. So yes, a lot of us are feeling very burnt out.

don’t get me started about gendered expectations either - I’m sure my students expect more of my time because I’m a woman - and I do care about them, a lot, but it takes away from my research time which is ultimately what gets you promotion

A friend in America left a non tenure track post and moved to another non tenure post in an Ivy League college. The post was made redundant. At 58 he is applying for fellowships, and scouting around for temporary translation work.

According to an online calculator 16.5k in 1988 which dh got as a postdoc would be 55.45k now.
Apart from research he did teaching and marking and was on a couple of committees. When his postdoc ended he was offered the opportunity to continue with the teaching unpaid.
He did some work for the Open University instead!

This is normal. I have a PhD and considered staying in academia but couldn't afford it. It's not just the salary but the lack of stability. I actually earn more as a schoolteacher believe it or not (admittedly private school).

In general, it seems that expertise is not valued, including expertise that is truly useful to society, and that is reflected in pay scales. It is sad. I don’t know how we change it.

Agree! Friends of my children graduated and walked into consultancy jobs paying 50k at 21. Honestly - what expertise can they bring to justify that? And that 50k very quickly rises!
Fair play to them. I'd be congratulating my children if they had managed to pull that off. But it's not right is it?

Someone up thread asked what I do. I look after dogs in my home, for people who don’t like kennels. I feed and walk the dogs at 730am and 3pm, the rest of the day is my own, to do what I please. I earn the same as a uni lecturer. Doesn’t seem right !