Tag: Funding

Categories
Academic

How much should I get paid?

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The thorny question of how much a university lecturer is worth…

Scholars’ remuneration packages fail to match pay in many other professions. Jack Grove reports

Academic salaries are no longer sufficient to attract the brightest and best into the sector, according to the co-author of a new global survey of higher education pay.

Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, said that academic pay lagged behind that of many other professionals, with pay gaps most pronounced in senior posts.

His comments preface the publication next month of a report on academic pay in 28 countries, titledPaying the Professoriate, jointly authored by academics at Boston College and the Higher School of Economics in Russia.

The study considered average salaries for academics in full-time permanent posts at public universities worldwide, adjusted to reflect the cost of living in each country. It indicated whether an academic salary was enough to allow scholars to live a “middle-class” lifestyle.

Read full story, where we see that UK comes 7th in the list… but try being an hourly paid lecturer – get nowhere near (and no job stability). See also related editorial.

Categories
Digital

More debt, less alcohol? @timeshighered

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It’s interesting to see how debt is affecting student decisions on spending:

The fifth biennial Sodexo-Times Higher Education University Lifestyle Survey is the last to quiz students under the lower tuition fees regime – and it reveals some telling views on the changing nature of the sector. Worries about debt have fallen as the current cohort realise what a comparatively good deal they have, yet it is clear that the dire state of the economy is affecting lifestyle choices. However some things – such as the paltry time spent in the library – never change. Jack Grove reports

Financial considerations: impact of £9,000 annual tuition fees

A quarter of students (26 per cent) would not have gone to university if they had had to pay £9,000 tuition fees, the poll reveals.

Although higher fees have not stopped sixth-formers applying to university, according to January’s application figures, the Sodexo-THE survey shows that many current undergraduates would have baulked at the prospect of taking on greater levels of graduate debt.

However, more than two-fifths of students (41 per cent) said the tuition-fee hike would have made no difference to their choices.

Students from newer universities were far more likely to say they would not have undertaken a degree course if they had faced increased charges – 35 per cent said they would not, compared with 16 per cent of students at older institutions.

Medics were the least likely to reconsider their selection in light of higher fees – 60 per cent said they would not have chosen differently.

Read full story.

Categories
History

Humanities Postgraduates? Preserve of the Rich?

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I received a small bursary from the University of Winchester in order to undertake my history PhD … is such a possibility going to become the exclusive preserve of large institutions with huge reserves of money/gifting? I gained a huge amount from being a part of the department, rather than a cog in the wheel!

The University of Oxford has received a multi-million-pound gift for postgraduate humanities study aimed at the world’s most promising scholars amid concern that public funding cuts could make such courses the preserve of elite institutions.

The donation – which will ultimately amount to around £26 million – was made by Mica Ertegun, a renowned interior designer and the widow of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Expected eventually to create at least 35 scholarships for humanities graduates at Oxford every year, the gift is the most generous for the study of the humanities in the institution’s 900-year history.

However, some observers fear that cuts to universities’ public funding will mean that only elite institutions with access to substantial donations and endowment income will be able to fully support postgraduate provision.

Postgraduates are not able to access the publicly subsidised student loans system. A recent report from the 1994 Group of smaller research-intensive universities warned of the dire consequences for postgraduate provision across the sector if future students, laden with debt from higher undergraduate fees, were not offered support for postgraduate fees.

Categories
Academic

Research collaboration?

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As someone who’s keen on collaboration, working in unity, etc, this is a story of concern:

The concentration of research funding in a few elite universities has been described as a “policy trap” that fails to reflect the modern trend towards wider academic collaboration.

Sir David Watson, professor of higher education and principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford, said policymakers were ignoring the fact that researchers were increasingly working across institutions and national borders.

In a speech due to be delivered at the annual conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, of which he is honorary president, on 7 December, he said that there was already a “stark conclusion” that funding had been concentrated in the UK “to the point where it has become dysfunctional”.

But the issue was also reinforcing an obsession – among vice-chancellors, politicians and funding bodies – with institutional competition, rather than with the real world of partnerships.

Read full story.

Categories
Academic Digital

#FASTECHUK makes @timeshighered

Winchester/Bath Spa: High-powered feedback loops

Two universities have been awarded almost £200,000 to run a three-year project looking at how to improve the use of technology in student feedback and assessment. The Learning and Teaching Development Unit at the University of Winchester and its counterpart at Bath Spa University were given the money by the IT body Jisc to run the scheme. The project – titled Feedback and Assessment for Students with Technology – is designed to use readily available technologies to enhance assessment and feedback at course, faculty and institutional levels.

See in context, and more information about the project (a website is currently being constructed).