Australia¡¯s best-paid university bosses preside over the institutions with among the worst student satisfaction, and the earnings gap between vice-chancellors and ordinary workers has increased fivefold since regulation of university leaders¡¯ salaries ended in the mid-1980s, an analysis has found.

The heads of Australia¡¯s research-intensive universities earned an average of just over A$300,000 (?150,000), in today¡¯s dollars, when the Academic Salaries Tribunal helped keep vice-chancellors¡¯ salaries in check in 1985. That was roughly five times the average full-time earnings of the time ¨C about A$62,000 ¨C and almost 24 times the maximum student income support of about A$13,000.

Vice-chancellors¡¯ salaries more than doubled over the ensuing decade, after the tribunal was scrapped as part of the 1980s higher education reforms. By 2023, top university bosses were pocketing around A$1.3 million ¨C 15 times the average earnings of about A$87,000, and 84 times the A$15,000 or so available through Youth Allowance.

¡°Our current system is deeply unfair,¡±??Jack Thrower, an economist and researcher with the Australia Institute thinktank. ¡°It¡¯s time to fix it.¡±

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He said a newly announced?expert governance council?would not be enough, because it would only be empowered to issue ¡°guidance¡± rather than binding rules. ¡°Bolder action is needed to rein in vice-chancellor remuneration, such as making federal funding conditional on capping remuneration to only two or three times more than lecturer salaries.¡±

The analysis also found that the universities with the most generously remunerated vice-chancellors had ¡°very low levels of student satisfaction¡±, as measured by the 2023??surveys, while the chiefs of the four top-rated institutions all earned below-average salaries.

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Thrower said executive pay was a relatively minor aspect of the sector¡¯s problems, and conceded that the best-paid vice-chancellors tended to run larger universities where satisfaction suffered because students felt invisible.

But this was no excuse, he told?Times Higher Education.?¡°If we¡¯re paying vice-chancellors based on their ability to manage large institutions, then¡­they should be able to manage such institutions [so that] there isn¡¯t such dissatisfaction,¡± he said.

¡°I wouldn¡¯t say there¡¯s a negative correlation [between executive salaries and student satisfaction]. It¡¯s not strong enough to be statistically significant. It¡¯s just that there doesn¡¯t seem to be a positive relationship there.¡±

He said relatively low vice-chancellors¡¯ salaries tended not to curry favour in university communities, because staff and particularly students had little awareness of things like leaders¡¯ pay. Nevertheless, exorbitant executive remuneration fuelled resentment when administrators started slashing courses and jobs.

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Thrower played down concerns that reregulating vice-chancellors¡¯ salaries might constrain institutional autonomy, which was mainly about universities having a free hand over issues of research and educational delivery ¨C not operational matters like executive pay.

The Senate¡¯s Education and Employment Legislation Committee has resolved to examine the impact of executive remuneration on staff, students and educational quality, as part of a wider inquiry into?university governance. Its report is due on 4 April.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com