This article is more than 1 year old
In real terms, quite the opposite.
As soon as the public conversation turns to spending money on higher education, someone will bring up senior staff pay.
Though for most providers the pay of the head of the institution is a drop in the ocean of staff costs, the idea that universities would be far better places if vice chancellors were paid less is one that people of many political persuasions are keen to sign up to. Nobody likes a “fat cat”.
This morning saw The Times give this bandwagon another kick (does anyone else remember Andrew Adonis’ campaigns or is it just me?) with the revelation that
top universities are paying vice chancellors an average of more than £400,000 a year despite calls for restraint in their salaries.
I’m not sure how they got that figure.
For me, I would head to HESA’s Finance collection, and specifically table 11. I’m interested in what it would actually say in the job advert – so for me “basic salary paid after salary sacrifice arrangements” is the go to for me. HESA annualises this (so even if a vice chancellor is only in post two months that year, the salary would show the equivalent of what they would have got for the year).
Looking at the vice chancellor in post at the end of the financial year there are only two institutional leaders that were paid more than £400,000 in the 2022-23 financial year: elite postgraduate provider the London Business School (alumni include former Secretary of State Gillian Keegan) and the Institute for Cancer Research (which is many things, but only sometimes a higher education provider).
It’s difficult to get a meaningful average for the sector as a whole (because a lot of providers have entered the sector in recent years) but the evidence isn’t there that we’ve been seeing inflation busting increases. For the biggest seven UK universities, the average has floated around £345,000 since 2018-19 – though there was a dip in the middle of the subsequent period this represents a real terms decline in value. For the rest of the Russell Group, the story is one of growth, from £293,000 in 2018-19 to £316,000 in 2022-23: although had pay risen by inflation the most recent figure should be £365,000.
Universities have had a tough time financially in recent years – and as a result we arguably have seen some real terms pay restraint among vice chancellors, the opposite of what The Times appears to be claiming. Opinions will differ as to whether this has been enough.
Obviously, these same financial pressures mean that few in HE have seen salaries grow above inflation. The closest we can get to this is plotting cost by FTE for academic and non-academic (horrible term, but the one HESA uses so I’ll keep in here for clarity’s sake) staff as a time series.
I know you’re a smart bunch of readers but just to be clear these figures do not represent an “average salary” – they show the average cost in salary or wages for one FTE staff member, with the grey line showing the average overall cost per FTE. These values could go up or down depending on the number of staff you have, and where they are on the pay scale compared to the previous year.