There’s little doubt that the biggest winners from the epic boom in international student ‘exports’ was university vice chancellors (VCs) and their senior executives:
Michael Sainsbury has done a terrific job exposing their exorbitant pay at Michael West Media:
Australia’s universities pay their top employees far closer to corporate salaries than to executives at even Australia’s biggest non-educational not-for-profit organisations. The salaries of the chief executives of Australia’s two largest non-educational or church charities, Red Cross Australia’s Judy Slatyer and World Vision Australia’s Claire Rogers ( who recently resigned) have been reported at between $350,000 and $400,000.
An investigation by Michael West Media has revealed that, members of the exclusive Group of Eight (G8) who sit atop the nation’s 41 universities have, between them, dozens of senior staff who are paid more than Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s salary of $549,250.
The Universities of Melbourne Sydney, NSW and Monash have at least half dozen executives on more money than the Prime Minister — and few if any of them teach.
The average annual vice chancellor’s (VC) salary in Australia in 2018 was just under $1 million, in stark contrast to the United Kingdom where the average was £270,000. Cambridge University vice-chancellor Stephen Toope, second highest paid in the UK, was on a basic salary of £431,000 in 2017-8 – a little over $A800,000…
So, it is little wonder that Duncan Maskell moved from a senior position at Cambridge University to Glyn Davis’s job the University of Melbourne when Davis was paid an Australian record $1,589,999 in 2018 in his last year as VC…
Hot on his heels was University of Sydney’s aggressive, pro-China vice chancellor Michael Spence, who has seen his pay soar more than 60% in the past five years…
Rounding out the G8, UNSW vice-chancellor Ian Jacobs received $1,288,478 in 2018 and University of Queensland’s Peter Hoj $1,199,999, Monash University’s Margaret Gardner (Glyn Davis’s wife), $1,109, 999, University of Adelaide’s Peter Rathjen $1,175,000 and University of Western Australia’s Dawn Freshwater, $1,095,000…
Outside the G8, the million-dollar club is headed by Australian Catholic University, the smallest in the country where Greg Craven received $1.25 million — Deakin’s Jane den Hollander, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Martin Bean, University of Technology of Sydney’s Attila Brugs all on $1.1 million and half a dozen more on $1-1.1 million…
Despite begging the government for wage assistance as they send casual staff – some of whom earn less in a year than the VCs do in a week – to the dole queue, only a handful of university VC’s, including UNSW and Melbourne University have cut pay to senior executive staff (20% apiece) with UNSW’s Jacobs now calling for voluntary pay cuts from other staff.
For years, Australian university chancellors and the governing bodies they chair have awarded salaries to our vice-chancellors that are up to twice those earned by comparable university leaders overseas…
Vice-chancellors now face the very difficult task of making deep cuts to programs and slashing jobs while trying to preserve their institution’s core missions.
The best way to establish their authority and credibility as leaders in these challenging times is to make major sacrifices themselves.
The hilarious thing is that universities are run as ‘charitable organisations’. Yet the degree-factories that they run, which rely on funneling as many international and domestic students as possible through cookie-cutter courses, are more akin to the very worst profit maximising corporations.
Why are there so many extremely well-paid administrators undertaking dubious activities unrelated to the universities’ mission?…
These buildings are filled with well-paid staff doing a range of activities, with many focused on recruiting and servicing international students…
Domestic students deserve better than they have been offered in recent years.
Standards need to improve. And there should be no more contrived group assignments where local students carry international students. Universities can also ditch those low-quality coursework masters’ degrees targeted at international students.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
