Are University Vice-Chancellors the new Bankers?

We may not stop loathing bankers any time soon, but we might have a new hate-figure: university vice-chancellors on fat salaries intent on pushing up university tuition fees when they come up for review sometime next year.
Why do VCs want families currently forking out £3,200 a year for an undergraduate degree, to pay £7000-£20,000 a year in tuition fees in addition to the income received from taxes? They all say it is so that universities can remain “world class”.
But the real reason, many including junior lecturers suspect, is so that vice-chancellors and other senior university staff can increase their pay. Earlier this year a number of institutions were forced to freeze VC pay after an outcry by lecturers and students over the higher-than-the-prime-minister pay of many VCs, and many-times-higher-than-inflation pay rises over the past few years.
The prime ministers remuneration is emerging as a benchmark for many top public sector salaries, whether they are universities, the BBC, or other civil servants. Everyone who earns more than the PM must now justify it. VCs earn on average £194,000 a year including benefits. That’s £10,000 more than the PM. A number of top-hitting VCs draw more than £300,000 a year from the public purse.
That may seem a lot to you and I and the PM, but for VCs it’s peanuts when across the Pond almost two dozen college “presidents” earn over US$1 million. When VCs say world class, they really mean world class lectures and tutorials, they mean world class salaries.
Their argument for “deserving” this is similar to the argument used by bankers: if they don’t get big bucks, they’ll leave for the countries where they can. But all is not well in the land of academia-honey, where salaries are the world class benchmark. Students and families are up in arms in California in ferocious protest against a 30 per cent tuition fee hike. They are out in the streets, perhaps for the first time since the Vietnam war. That’s a pretty serious protest, and not one that VCs want to see here.
The Netherlands, the first European Union country to introduce tuition fees in the mid-1980s, increased them by around 5-10 per cent a year. But in the mid-1990s when the government proposed a 50 per cent fee hike, students blocked railway lines, bringing transport to a halt. The government was forced to back down, finally agreeing to a 25 per cent fee rise over three years.
If anything that should indicate the limits to world class fee rises. Yet in this country VCs seem to think increases of 100 per cent or more are realistic.
The government is attempting to call their bluff somewhat, by focusing on value-for-money education after embarrassing parliamentary committee hearings on dumbed down university exams, and institutions that provide only two hours of tutor-student contact time for £3,200. But VCs continue to push the notion that world class universities don’t come cheap. Recently they even evoked the twin globalisation bogeymen hoping to frighten us into emptying our pockets. India and China will “catch up and overtake” us if we are not careful. Now, anyone who has seen the average university lecture theatre in Beijing or Delhi will be stifling their guffaws, only to be laughing on the other side of their faces when they realise this argument is seriously being used to make us pay more towards tuition.
I am no expert on the world class university, so lets hear from the experts:
“There is no universal recipe or magic formula for making a world class university, but nonetheless, one cardinal rule seems to be that money alone will not buy you a coveted spot on the annual list of the world’s elite institutions,” said Jamil Salmi in his report for the World Bank on “The Challenge of Establishing World Class Institutions,” hot off the presses this summer.
World class status is not achieved by self-declaration either, the report notes. Rather, elite status is conferred by the outside world on the basis of international recognition.
I’m willing to go with the World Bank on that. But the World Bank does say that a major feature of worldclassness is the ability to attract talent from other countries and yes, big research budgets do count.
So lets examine that, because VCs have been saying they will lose the best talent to “abroad” without higher tuition fees (read VC salaries). Cambridge University VC Alison Richard was lured back to Britain from Yale University in 2003, which is the opposite direction to what VCs are saying. And for more than a decade, English universities have been a magnet for academics from the rest of Europe. The brain gain in favour of Britain has far, far outweighed the brain drain in the last 15 years, even without high tuition fees. We’ve even gained scientists from the US, because during the Bush era, stem cell research was a no-no in the US, but was flourishing here.
But back to the people who count: those who want an education and have to pay for it. World class university status is irrelevant to the majority of school leavers who are applying for undergraduate degrees in their own country. What matters to them is the national standing of the university – and as it happens, we have four universities in the world’s top ten, not just world class but world leading, for them to aspire to. Postgraduates and researchers look at courses in different countries before making a choice. But postgraduates are already charged “the market rate” in England, so the link between fees and worldclassness is not really about them.
World class is really not about class or standards at all. It is a euphemism for the “global market”. A recent study John Aubrey Douglas at the University of Berkeley and Ruth Keeling at Cambridge University found that university fees are driven up towards to what the student “market” will bear, not just within countries but globally. The higher the price, the better the institution, the market seems to believe. In the US “pricing equals prestige” is now the major influence on fees for graduate students, in particular for professional degrees such as medicine, law, engineering and business, the study of two dozen universities in the US and Europe concluded.
This trend, which started in the US, is now becoming apparent in Europe, often, the study notes, irrespective of any link with the quality of the teaching or with institutional costs. In fact, the authors detect a “growing disassociation between pricing and the actual costs of an educational programme.”
The problem with these trends is that they are dependent on students taking out huge loans and believing that future earnings will help them pay them off. That belief has been severely shaken by the recession. Despite the recession, the study predicts that institutions that are globally competitive will continue to “look over their shoulder at what their perceived peer or near-peer institutions are charging for specific degrees and programmes.” That does not bode well, if say, the US emerges from recession long before we do.
Some universities are even using the recession as an excuse for wanting to charge more, because university budgets - paid out of taxation - are being squeezed.
Andrew Oswald, professor of Economics at Warwick University (whose vice chancellor is one Prof. Nigel Thrift, oh the irony of it) wants it both ways. “It would help if there was more public sector funding in Research and Development, but students need to pay for their own education,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
Demanding more public funding while wanting pay levels like the private sector? Very much like bankers, then.