university salaries - what is going on?

[NM_123]

So do they have any vacancies then ... just wondering?

[The Red Rose of Cork]

A lecturer starting in a university in ireland is paid €35500 a year. Hardly a cushy figure, and has to now pay a pension levy out of that

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

Personally I think you have it all wrong. We have all heard the explanation, if you don't pay top dollar, you don't get the quality people in these positions. This is self evidently true.
What we need to do is to double or treble the salaries of our TDs, ministers, judges, bankers etc..

Obviously the rediculously low salaries we are paying are the reason we have such a poor standard of person currently running around trying to fix the problem, they created.

MP's in the UK and TD's in Ireland have been trotting out the old chestnut about them being equivalent to private sector leaders for a long time. The average MP here in the UK is out of work for an average of 18months after they leave office so I've always been a bit suspicious of the comparison.


George Osborne, for example, in the Tory party reckons he's qualified to be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer but as far as I can see he's only had a few months summer job working behind the counter at Selfridges as work experience!

[ditchhurler]

A lecturer starting in a university in ireland is paid €35500 a year. Hardly a cushy figure, and has to now pay a pension levy out of that

Great - use an example that's the minimum wage for lecturers. It's still ahead of the average industrial wage from day 1 and they get increments every year - by the age of 35-40 they can reasonably expect to be at the top of the scales below- how do the average lecturer salaries compare versus the UK for example. From this link seems to me that lecturers here are paid more than many professors in the UK.

TUI, Teacher Salary Scales, Deparment of Education and Science

[blacbloc]

Nixers are commonplace among university lecturing staff - especially those with ties to industry - computing, technology etc. Professors are paid astronomical sums in Ireland. All this stuff about needing to keep 'talent' in the country is nonsense - if they were doing such a great job then why has all this happened anyway. Overpaid people become complacent and greedy - as 2-secod glance at the cabinet will tell you.

[riven]

A lecturer starting in a university in ireland is paid €35500 a year. Hardly a cushy figure, and has to now pay a pension levy out of that

Indeed it is a cushy figure considering that there is not a single engineering graduate that can expect to start on a higher salary even after getting a MSc.

[dennehym]

Here's some more 6 figure salaries for a job you will never get fired from

Could you post the salary scales for the non-senior lecturers and the rest of the research staff?
And include the €17k that the graduate students are on in that, would you, since they tend to do the bulk of the work with labs, tutorials, practical work, invigilating, marking exercises and so on.

[dennehym]

Indeed it is a cushy figure considering that there is not a single engineering graduate that can expect to start on a higher salary even after getting a MSc.

I've known engineering graduates who did. And even though that doesn't happen today, by the time a lecturer makes it to 'senior' status, they're already out of pocket by a substantial amount compared to what they would have been earning in industry, especially in IT.

And don't forget, lecturers don't have tenure and are all on contract, not all of which are being renewed.

Life in academia isn't roses and tea for everyone y'know.

[Gruffalo]

Could you post the salary scales for the non-senior lecturers and the rest of the research staff?
And include the €17k that the graduate students are on in that, would you, since they tend to do the bulk of the work with labs, tutorials, practical work, invigilating, marking exercises and so on.

The word student does not seem to mean anything to the poster. 17000 while still a student is not to shabby.

[Finbar10]

I've known engineering graduates who did. And even though that doesn't happen today, by the time a lecturer makes it to 'senior' status, they're already out of pocket by a substantial amount compared to what they would have been earning in industry, especially in IT.

And don't forget, lecturers don't have tenure and are all on contract, not all of which are being renewed.

Life in academia isn't roses and tea for everyone y'know.

I've had discussions about this with a good friend (since from college days back in the 1980s) who's an academic in one of the dublin universities. He admits that salaries are very generous by European standards (even compared to the French and German systems) and are pretty decent even compared to US ones (especially with a strong Euro now). A bog standard lecturer with a reasonable number of years under their belt (not at the bottom of their scale) would be on 70/80,000 or so, most senior lecturers edging over the 100,000 mark, and professors normally at minimum on around 130,000, but with various top ups for being head of department, doing research etc. could be well over 150,000. Then there are academics not on the scale at all, some earning 250,000 and more. To be earning 35,000 or so I guess a person would have to be just starting off. There also seems to be an "above the bar" distinction. Once a person goes above this level there's a substantial increase in salary. He does say there are certainly people not particularly well paid, technicians and secretaries maybe only on 40,000s. But he reckons most adminstrators are quite generously renumerated as well, sometimes very substantially so. There would be people on temporary contract again not terribly well paid, but he reckons before long almost all of these will have been let go anyway.

Not sure about the tenure distinction. I guess one is either temporary or permanent as a lecturer. One cannot be strung along on temporary contracts forever. I would guess being permanent in an Irish university is effectively "tenure". Maybe that will change though.

Also don't think comparing to salaries for the IT bubble is realistic. Can't allow that to skew everything. That's only a small fraction of university staff. I'd wonder anyway if salary levels in that field anything near as generous these days?

70/80,000 as some kind of line manager in a multinational perhaps is realistic. Being head of the Irish of a multinational probably could command far more. But there are very few of these positions. Pay levels in Irish universities are unarguably very cushy, same for the entire public service. The middle levels are overpaid, the upper levels are grossly overpaid. Even teachers, guards, and nurses (the poster boys and girls of the public service ) ain't doing too badly. Sure, their jobs aren't easy. But that could be said of those jobs anywhere. I'd doubt if many teachers or guards here would, if they could, consider transferring to similar positions in the UK. Those jobs there have far less pay, less status in the eyes of the community, and are probably even more difficult to do than here.