Why are university vice-chancellors being paid double the salary of the PM when the sector is struggling? - Jayne Dowle

The highest was the London School of Economics, whose vice-chancellor, Baroness Shafik, was earning a package worth £533,000. A former deputy governor of the Bank of England, she left LSE in July 2023.

The lowest was the University of Manchester, whose then vice-chancellor Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell refused to take a pay rise for several years. She earned just over £260,000 and left this summer.

Two other Russell Group vice-chancellors, at Leeds and Glasgow universities, did not take a pay rise in 2023.

Setting any salary against that of the Prime Minister is a bit of a cliched comparison to be honest, but nothing outlines the crazy situation in higher education more starkly.

Whilst ministers desperately find ways to plug the university funding gap, caused in part by the decline in numbers of overseas students, the men and women at the top of the management chain earn the equivalent of FTSE 100 bosses. It’s worth saying that their equivalents running companies can be kicked out by shareholders if commercial success falters.

As yet, no government has been brave enough to apply similar sanctions to vice-chancellors. Yet there is so much political hand-wringing over ‘failing’ universities, and the slashing of courses and redundancies to save money.

As of April 2024, the Prime Minister is entitled to a gross annual salary of £172,153. That consists of a basic salary for an MP of £91,346, plus a further £80,807 entitlement as PM. However, according to the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason, following the example of predecessors Rishi Sunak and indeed Boris Johnson, Starmer opts to take around £5,000 less than he could, so around £166,786.

The prime minister receives other benefits, including housing – Number 10 Downing Street and weekend retreat Chequers – but for that money he is in charge of the country, in war and peace.

As Starmer battles on at home and abroad, dealing with myriad challenges including Trump, Putin, and the NHS, vice-chancellors have to fret about paying the gardener.

Meanwhile, student tuition fees go up to £9,535 a year, saddling young people with yet more debt on graduation. So-called maintenance loans typically don’t even cover rent.

And lecturers, toiling at the actual coalface of academia, often without secure tenure (so no sick pay, holiday leave etc), earn on average, £19.24 an hour, amounting to £37,514 per year, or a little above the average UK wage across all sectors.

For more than 10 years, I was a part-time senior lecturer in a Yorkshire university, leaving in 2014 when the crushing workload and the dubious morality of huge class sizes packed with bewildered young people from overseas made me consider my conscience. Rates of academic pay have barely risen in the decade since.

Yet it is lecturers – and senior lecturers, professors and other academic staff – who do the actual teaching, the research (if they are not too time-strapped/exhausted to fit it in) and contribute directly to precious university rankings and student satisfaction.

No wonder lecturers have taken industrial action during the last few years; for as long as senior management preside over them with six-figure salaries, numerous perks and gilt-edged pensions, protest is justified.

Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union, which represents lecturers, calls this a “broken funding model [which] vice-chancellors themselves lobbied for and continue to defend.”

“Raising tuition fees is pouring more fuel on the fire: we urgently need the government to stop rewarding the failures of those responsible for this mess and to instead increase public funding with guarantees that protect jobs and student provision.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson need to join forces to tackle these feather-bedded vice-chancellors.

For too long now, universities have been left alone and unchallenged by a series of ineffective Tory Education Secretaries lacking courage to tackle the challenges.

The government should head a commission to establish reasonable ceilings for vice-chancellor salaries, keeping in line with other public leadership roles, such as local councils. Instead of piling the pressure on students, it should look at how universities themselves are run and funded, develop a new blueprint to cut wasteful spending and inefficiencies, and take leaders to task for complaining about underfunding then paying themselves over the odds.

The justification for such high pay and attractive perks is that UK universities must compete with other countries to attract the best leaders. Well, if this is the case, these leaders must prove their credentials and show the way towards a more sustainable university climate.