Down and out in Academe

Students who are keen to undertake PhDs and have academic careers are being put off by the salaries. Chris Smythe describes a generation lost to British universities

Anxious secondary-school pupils aren't the only ones poring over the Government's new White Paper on higher-education funding. Postgraduate students have also been studying the proposals with care. This isn't just an opportunity for schadenfreude at the potential debts of their younger siblings, but a reform that might significantly affect their future earning power. For this is the group from which the academics of tomorrow will be drawn, and higher undergraduate fees are intended as a solution to the funding crisis that has seen academic salaries drop to their present meagre levels.

Anxious secondary-school pupils aren't the only ones poring over the Government's new White Paper on higher-education funding. Postgraduate students have also been studying the proposals with care. This isn't just an opportunity for schadenfreude at the potential debts of their younger siblings, but a reform that might significantly affect their future earning power. For this is the group from which the academics of tomorrow will be drawn, and higher undergraduate fees are intended as a solution to the funding crisis that has seen academic salaries drop to their present meagre levels.

Few, however, saw the 6 per cent increase in total higher-education funding as likely to make a big difference. "I don't see that this can really solve the problem of low salaries," says Adam Amara, a PhD student in cosmology at Cambridge. "It doesn't suggest that the Government has really seen the scale of the deterrent they are posing to anyone considering an academic career."

The problem has hardly crept up on the Government. It has been building for decades, as university budgets have not kept pace with rising student numbers. Funding per student has halved in the last 20 years, and the result is that lecturers' pay has risen by just 6 per cent in real terms since 1981, compared to 44 per cent for all full-time employment. In 1999, the Bett report recommended a 20 per cent pay increase by 2002. It didn't happen. Sir Gareth Roberts's report last year into the state of British science identified the problem as a serious threat for the future. As Adam Amara succinctly puts it: "A professor in Cambridge can't even afford to buy a house there. What kind of career is that?"

Attempts have been made to counter the problem. Before the recent announcement, the Government had committed to increasing spending on higher education by 18 per cent on 1997 levels by the academic year 2003/04, an injection of £1.7bn. The effects are slowly filtering through to pay. Last September the lecturers' unions accepted a 3.5 per cent pay rise. More important for postgraduates is that they now get £8,000 a year to live on, rising to £12,000 by 2005. Three years ago it was £6,000.

These increases, however, do not seem to have had the desired effect. "When you compare it with what you earn going straight into a job, it's really pretty low," says Masters student Henry Midgley, a historian at Cambridge. "You have to be committed to live on that for three or four years doing a PhD." This concern is shared across the spectrum of academic disciplines, reflecting the fact that it is the most junior (and most senior) academic staff who come off worst in salary comparisons with other occupations.

Lucy Heady, a Cambridge PhD physics student, is concerned at the years of short-term postdoctoral research contracts that new PhDs usually have to go through before they get a permanent post. "Salary is very important. To accept that sort of instability for £14,000 a year is not very appealing. Particularly if I want to have children; I don't know if I could afford it until I had a permanent job, and who knows when that would be? If the salary were nearer £25,000 there'd be something to fall back on."

It's no surprise that the problem is most severe in those subjects offering an obvious path to a well-paying job, such as in law, economics and engineering. Cambridge Master of Laws student Patrik Peyer says: "I love the freedom of academia, but it's not hard to see the attraction of being paid three times as much." Economics departments have been registering large drops in domestic graduate enrolment for several years; only about 10 per cent of those on economics PhDs are now home students. Few of those from overseas intend to stick around for a career in British academia. "I'll get my degree and then I'll leave the country," says the Greek economist Nicholas Vrousalis at Cambridge. Most economists don't even make it as far as graduate work. "I have [economist] friends who'd like to come back to university," Henry Midgley says, "but they've got too attached to their London salaries to take the pay cut."

The implications of this pose a "serious risk to the quality of teaching and research" in British universities, to quote the Bett report. Staff shortages already exist in the problem subjects of law, engineering and economics and business, and they are imminent in many others. With up to one-third of current academics due to retire by 2005, it's feared that there may not be enough candidates to fill the vacancies. And the Roberts report warns of declining quality among those who do apply, with many of the best candidates acting on their misgivings and heading for the private sector.

With such a crisis looming, it is no wonder that graduates are wary of academia. Adam Amara's solution is not the most encouraging for the Department for Education and Skills: "I'll just try to get a research job in America."

education@independent.co.uk

The writer is taking a Masters in political thought and intellectual history at Cambridge and debating whether to pursue a life of penury in universities or opt for the private sector