"Put down that wrench!"

The Independent is reporting that the government is to put an extra £1.5Bn into academic salaries. Notable quotes:

At Labour's National Policy Forum on 1 December, [Tony Blair] said university lecturers were "probably the worst-paid workers in the public sector".

He said their pay had only increased by five per cent in the past 20 years whereas the figure for the rest of the economy was 45 per cent.

The article goes on to note that this might mean pay rises of up to 18%, though doesn't attribute this figure.

More coverage of the top-up fees issue in today's Grauniad, which analyses the DfES's claim of a lifetime salary premium of £400,000 enjoyed by graduates (or to put it a different way, a £10,000 salary premium for each year of your forty year working life) and finds it rather wanting. Of particular note is the comment (from an academic at Essex) that "graduates only maintain their premium if they work in a field where their skills are in short supply". Still think that the graduate premium will be £400,000 when 50% of young people end up at University?

In other news, the BBC is reporting that a Commons report is critical of UK HE for its use of short term contracts in research. Hardly a surprise, given that the Bett report said exactly the same thing, but it's good to see that the issue is being kept in the media.

Good comment piece by Roy Hattersley in today's Grauniad on ways of solving the funding crisis in UK higher education without recourse to the £6000+ tuition fees that various universities are threatening (Imperial College and Warwick, my first university, being the chief culprits). Hattersley, as sensible as ever (shame he's not still on the front benches), advocates a graduate tax as a progressive source of funding that properly reflects the advantage that a degree confers on a graduate, unlike the fees-and-loans fiasco, and goes so far as to say that such a tax should be "levied on all graduates, not just those who take their degrees after this year" and that "it will be possible to limit it to comparatively high earnings". If only...

For those of you who haven't exiled yourselves to the UK HE gulag, this article by Richard Gombrich gives a good summary of the current state of UK HE (and its decline and fall over the last four decades) which pulls very few punches. The statistics on HE funding (particularly for resources like libraries) and pay are particularly sobering.

Other relevant reading includes the Dearing Report on Higher Eduction in the Learning Society - of particular note are the sections on increasing student maintenance (ie. grants) and HE pay and graduate taxation as a source of funding. The Bett Report (on the Independent Review of Higher Education Pay and Conditions, and a snip at £80 from HMSO - summary available elsewhere, with contemporary coverage from the BBC) made a number of recommendations on HE pay and funding, most of which have been duly ignored. The BBC has good general coverage on the issue, as always.