The University Rich List report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance reveals 210 staff at Glasgow earn over £100,000, and 55 members of staff over £150,000.
The University of Glasgow has ranked the fourth-highest in the UK for numbers of staff earning over six-figure salaries, a new report reveals.
The report “University Rich List” by the TaxPayers’ Alliance has shown that the University of Glasgow is ranked fourth in the UK for the number of staff on over £100,000 annually. As of the 2019/2020 financial year, the University had 210 staff on a wage packet totalling over £100,000 and 55 members of senior management on over £150,000, ranking fifth for university staff earning over £150,000. This represents an increase of 19 staff from the previous year on or over the threshold.
These findings come amidst a backdrop of two separate financial crises in higher education. Student debt is soaring with only 25% of students expected to fully pay off their loan, placing a greater financial burden on the taxpayer to cover the cost of higher education. This is in addition to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has not only hampered students’ experience and the value for money but also increased the financial burden of universities as a result of a dramatic fall in the number of international students. It was the latter that the university cited in May when they informed postgraduate teaching staff on one and two-year contracts in the college of social and political sciences that they would not be allocated teaching hours and their contracts terminated.
The author of the report, Scott Simmonds, a researcher for TaxPayers’ Alliance, highlighted this dichotomy in his remarks: “These rankings reveal the thousands of university bosses taking home very plush pay packets despite begging for a Covid bailout. Taxpayers and students will be left with more than a degree of uncertainty over whether this is money well spent – especially when students are paying a premium to be locked up in halls with no face-to-face teaching. Instead of blaming covid, uni bosses need to get these steep salaries under control and focus on providing students with the very best higher education they can during the pandemic.”
Nationally, the report found that there were at least 4,112 university staff with a total wage package of more than £100,000, within which 860 were earning over £150,000. Proportionately, this means that the University of Glasgow employs 6% of staff earning over £150,000 in UK universities. A caveat to this data is that it comes from 151 institutions, with the notable exceptions of Oxford and Cambridge who did not provide the required response to the Freedom of Information request due to concerns over time and expense of gathering the data.
With a quarter of universities not giving complete data for staff, the report concludes that the actual number of staff at UK universities earning over 100,000 is “significantly” higher than the data provided.You can read the report and see the full rankings here.
