The financial state of Australian universities

On Saturday the Australian Financial Review had a good, but disturbing, article, Uni chiefs reap million-dollar salaries, record surpluses as jobs cut. It is behind a paywall, but a hard copy photo is below.


Of particular note is how the Vice Chancellors (Presidents) of regional universities (which are like community colleges in rural parts of the USA), which most readers outside of Australia will never even have heard of, are given salaries around one million AUD. Given the relatively low cost of living in their locations, those salaries are even more spectacular.


An issue that is not discussed in the article is how at each university there is a whole cabal of senior managers, not just the VC, who are on exorbitant salaries and packages. For example, if you look at this organisational chart for UQ, I count four deputy VCs and 8 pro-VCs. In addition, there are more than ten Executive Deans and Directors of Institutes. That means there are probably about twenty people on packages in the range of $500K to $1M. None of this is public information, as far as I am aware, even though these are public institutions. For comparison, the Prime Minister of Australia receives a salary of around $600K.

One VC whose salary is not listed in the table is Brian Schmidt from ANU (Australian National University). This is because, last year he negotiated his salary down to $484,000, about half that of the other VCs. Refreshing!

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