UK academics undervalued by billions of pounds, says report

The authors imply that the economic value of HE either in part or full flow to academic staff, ignoring any investment risk absorbed by funders, primarily the taxpayer and students themselves. Although HE has reluctantly evolved somewhat during Covid, the real question is how can institutions increase productivity in a way that would make remuneration increases anything other than rent-seeking. Averting productivity increases by migrating cost-disease to students and taxpayers will not produce a sustainable solution, and will likely further decrease our sector's trust and credibility with the public.

Because the sector is “operating in a state of extreme market failure. Never a truer word was said. Many institutions in HE sector in the UK are riddled with agency problems, poor internal governance, rent seeking and other issues. What about the thousands of pounds of bonuses/retention payments to managerial staff in some places, thousands paid to select academics as market supplements or such arrangements sometime purely for the purposes of the REF? Much of this is due to poor governance and lack of any credible oversight. To build excellent institutions you also need excellence in leadership. Interesting to note that the report notes that the HE is "trapped in a vicious circle of mediocrity" - According to the latest REF "REF has recognised the wide distribution of excellent research – both across the UK, with over 80 per cent of research judged to be world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) in each UK nation and English region; and across a broad group of universities, of all sizes and types, with world-leading quality identified in 99 per cent of participating universities."

"Viewforth estimated the real economic value of staff by using a technique called “shadow pricing” to look at what staff with similar skills were paid in other industries and in more competitive higher education sectors, principally the US." This approach is "Fairy Land", completely pointless and "proves" nothing of importance. "Shadow pricing" as a concept achieves nothing practical and is doomed to failure. How on earth do they define "real economic value"? There is nothing real about this artificial figure. The results are worthless, as far as policy is concerned. What is real, is the actual money paid to the staff. It may not be what they would like to be paid and there may be many people outside the sector who believe they should be paid more. Ask all public sector workers if they think they are paid their "real economic value" and over 90% would say they were worth more. (Probably 70% in the private sector) If people want to move, to earn more, let them move. The dire consequences forecast above will never come about while there are other people willing to replace those doing the current work. No one is forced to be an "underpaid" professor / researcher etc and so far, the wider public are not convinced the world will end because of so called "under funding".

Looking at actual pay is useless to determine if that pay is fair or not. It is like looking at a company's current stock price to determine if it is fairly priced. Looking at actual pay is useful if one wants to check for example if the pay differential between a professor and a research asssisant are justified (even if both are underpaid/overpaid in the same way). Arguments such as no one is forced to be an "underpaid" professor type arguments is just very cynical and unhelpful. By this argument, no one should protest against anything that is unfair, unethical and so on. If I see something unfair or unethical that happens in my company, in my neighbourhood etc. I just move? What is needed to counter arguments such as those being made in the article is convincing arguments for why one thinks the current market rates are right.

The system in my area is only kept going because there is a string of overseas staff prepared to apply for posts. I cannot remember the last time that a shortlist included a home candidate. It is great to have a diverse range of nationalities in the department but home students have already figured out that being an academic is not a good deal anymore. Engaging in years of extra study to start (at age 26 or 27) on a salary that equates to a ticket collector on the trains if the BBC is to be believed is not appealing!

Price fixing (e..g, tuition fees) doesn't work - who would had guessed?!?

Indeed. That is totally nonsensical. Most staff will not see a penny of the increased revenues reflected in their pay. If they did, maybe they would be more willing to take on some of extra workload. In many places research budgets have been severly cut even when rankings supposedly have gone up.