UK: University rich list revealed as figures show over 4,000 staff are paid more than £100,000 a year

More than 4,000 university staff are paid more than £100,000 a year, a new rich list has revealed.

Edinburgh University had the most high earners last year, with 359 staff receiving over £100,000 in total remuneration, of which 110 received over £150,000.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, which compiled the rich list by sending freedom of information requests to 120 institutions, said that higher pay is “soaring” in universities.

In 2016/17, there were 3,947 university staff members paid over £100,000 which rose by 12 per cent to 4,423 the following year. The number of staff paid over £150,000 rose by a similar proportion over the same period, from 867 to 976.

Kieran Neild of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said their findings shine a light on the “thousands of university administrators taking home very plush pay packets”.

He said: "Taxpayers and students will be left with a degree of uncertainty over whether this is money is being well spent, particularly when left-wing professors are so keen to lecture them about the evils of inequality.

"Instead of constantly complaining about faculty budget cuts, university bosses need to get their bumper wage bills under control and focus on providing their students with the very best higher education they can."

British universities employed 429,560 people last year, according to data from the Higher Education Statistical Agency, up 2.3 per cent from the year before.

David Palfreyman, director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, said that vice-Chancellors now surround themselves with a “cadre” of highly paid managerial staff. “Compared with 25-30 years ago, there are now far more managers at universities,” he said.

Mr Palfreyman, who is the Bursar at New College, Oxford, added that there is “some justification” to accusation that the higher education sector has got “carried away” with “administrative bloat”. 

Vice-Chancellors have come under fire for their vast paypackets. Earlier this year it emerged that the average pay for university chiefs rose above £250,000 for the first time as more than 100 institutions offered pay rises in the last year despite heavy criticism of the salaries.

According to the Office for Students, the average basic salary for a university vice chancellor rose ahead of inflation, from £245,000 a year to £253,000 a year, with five heads earning more than £500,000 with benefits and severance payments included.

The universities watchdog has warned that university chiefs must be prepared to answer “tough questions” and be able to justify their salaries where necessary. 

There has been increased scrutiny on large salaries of university chiefs, especially after student fees rose to £9,250 per year at many institutions.

Ministers have called on universities, which are autonomous and set their own salaries, to show more restraint rather than “ratcheting up” salaries at a higher rate than inflation.

A spokesman for Universities UK said: “It is important for universities to demonstrate that the process for determining pay for senior university staff is rigorous and that decisions are fair, explained and justified.

“We support the Committee of University Chairs’ Remuneration Code and its principles to create a more transparent system for determining senior staff pay.”

SOURCE 






California State University System’s Math Problem

The education bureaucrats in California have a public-relations problem. State education officials sold the Common Core K-12 academic standards to skeptical parents with the officials’ promise that kids would be “college- and career-ready.” California State University administrators sold abolition of remedial classes to incoming students and their parents with the administrators’ promise that without having to take these classes, students would graduate from college sooner. Now the CSU faculty is unhappy—the incoming students don’t know math, even at the most basic level.

State officials promised that high school graduates would be college-ready. In fact, they are not college-ready in math. Isn’t it cheating taxpayers to promise one thing and provide much less?

In the fall of 2018, CSU abolished its remedial freshmen courses in English and math, with the explanation that this change would raise graduation rates. Instead of remediation, students were supposed to take—for full credit—new courses that include both the regular and the remedial material. CSU officials assured us at the time that this new policy was not about dumbing down expectations but rather giving students a leg up while maintaining the rigor.

How such a miracle was supposed to be accomplished was left unclear. Teaching a double-dose course and expecting better results strains credulity. And, at the same time CSU made another decision about expectations for its students. For decades, in order to graduate from CSU, students had to take Intermediate Algebra, which was a general education requirement. CSU dropped this requirement and has allowed students to take less-analytical non-algebra-based math courses instead. So much for the promise of “not lowering expectations.”

Suddenly, we hear now that CSU is considering beefing up its admission requirements with a fourth year of high school math, since its faculty now feels three years are insufficient for incoming students. CSU’s explanation? “The goal of the change is to better prepare students for success at CSU and to enable more students to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) majors once they enter college.”

That sounds positive and reasonable on its face, yet the extra-year math requirement is not for STEM-related math such as trigonometry or pre-calculus, but a “Quantitative Reasoning” course. What is meant by that? parents are asking. CSU officials and faculty say they want incoming students, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “who can figure out if they can afford a credit card, determine whether the new furniture will fit into their apartment, understand if they should buy or lease a car and even explain why greenhouse gases cause climate change.”

An observant parent would certainly ask: What is the connection between what is clearly a consumer-math course and better preparation for STEM. The short answer is: There is no connection.

Independently, various civil rights organizations started to raise a ruckus arguing that any additional admission requirement will make life more difficult for marginal students and place another obstacle on their path to a degree. They are right, yet we didn’t hear any organization ask a different question: How is a consumer-math course supposed to prepare more students for STEM?

The plot thickens. In 2010, California adopted the Common Core standards. Experts warned that its expectations are below California’s prior 1997 academic standards in math. To make things worse, our Legislature in its infinite wisdom declared students who passed Common Core’s mediocre tests were “college ready” by fiat, and forced CSU to accept such students without remediation, even before remediation classes were eliminated.

To illustrate the foolishness of this decision, in 2014, the last year before Common Core tests, fewer than 22,000 California students qualified as “college ready” in math. In 2015, the first year of the Common Core test, more than 45,000 students were labeled qualified, and the number has grown since then to more than 56,000 today. Clearly such a big jump overnight indicates not an increase in student readiness but the lowering of the passing bar.

Lowering the bar is detrimental to students because it gives them the illusion of college-readiness, when they are not in fact ready.

But CSU was stuck. The state sets its budget, and the state insisted on CSU accepting many such unprepared students. CSU tried to figure out how to raise the preparedness of incoming students, and it hit on the idea of requiring a fourth year of high school math. The natural path would be to require courses more demanding than the 11th grade Common Core test, such as classes in pre-calculus or AP statistics. Yet this path was impossible, as it would expose the fact that Common Core is low-level, while California politicians and the California Department of Education have argued for years that Common Core is “demanding and has a high-level of expectations.” So in a classic “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” outcome, CSU has proposed requiring an additional and meaningless consumer-math course, raising the ire of various constituencies in the process.

SOURCE 






Jewish boys taunted in shocking cases of anti-Semitic bullying at Australian schools

A 12-year-old Jewish student was forced to kneel down and kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate, while a five-year-old boy was allegedly called a "Jewish cockroach" and repeatedly hounded in the school toilets by his young classmates.

The two incidents this year – the first involving a year 7 boy at Cheltenham Secondary College and the second a prep student at Hawthorn West Primary School – have prompted the Anti-Defamation Commission to sound an alarm about what it says is a "rapidly spreading" crisis involving anti-Semitic bullying in Victorian state schools.

Both boys, whose parents have asked to remain anonymous, have since left the schools where the incidents occurred, with the five-year-old boy currently being home schooled.

The older boy’s act of kissing another student’s shoes, under threat of being swarmed by several other boys, was filmed, photographed and shared on social media.

No disciplinary action has been taken against the group of boys involved in the incident, which took place in a public park.

The mother said she was bitterly disappointed by the response of Cheltenham Secondary College and the Education Department.

The school and the department have denied having responsibility for the incident, because it did not take place on school grounds, the mother said.

"I took such offence with the Education Department, because there was nothing they did to protect my son at all, at any point in time – that’s what’s cut me up," she said.

The mother sought out the parents of the Muslim boy, who were horrified by their son’s actions.

"We sat down, his parents, the two boys and myself, around the table and explained the velocity of [the bullying] and what it meant to us as parents as far as building bridges between Jews and Muslims in society and not creating division like that photo does," she said.

One of the boys who watched on was later suspended for five days for assaulting the Jewish student in the school locker room.

The Jewish boy was punched in the face and left with a bruised back and had skin gouged out of his shoulder, his mother said.

The mother of the five-year-old boy at Hawthorn West Primary said her son was repeatedly taunted and laughed at over his circumcised penis, to the point where he began to wet himself in class rather than go to the toilet.

The taunts – which the education department said could not be corroborated because they were not overheard by teachers – led the school to temporarily provide a separate toilet for the boy as a "safety plan", although this plan failed on its second day.

The mother said one of the most disturbing aspects of the other children’s insults was the way they mirrored the anti-Semitic language of the Holocaust. "The words ‘you dirty Jew’ and ‘Jewish cockroach’, they are such cliches," she said.

"I grew up with Holocaust survivors, I used to go to synagogue with my uncle who was a Holocaust survivor and those were the words, literally, he was taunted with when he was five."

The department conceded last month in an apology letter to the parents that the boy had been laughed at in the toilets by other students on this day and said this was unacceptable.

"While school staff were not able to substantiate that any negative interactions were anti-Semitic in nature, on the basis of those investigations, school staff identified an incident that involved children laughing at [the boy]," department director Barbara Crowe said. "This was not acceptable and would have been an unpleasant experience for [the boy]. I am sorry that this occurred."

But the mother said the school had made an error of judgment by treating the incident as general bullying, not anti-Semitism. "Why not just say, this is anti-Semitism and talk about it? These are things that happen to different people and different religions," she said.

The parents have lost confidence in Hawthorn West Primary School’s ability to care for their son, and are home schooling him while looking for a new school.

Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, said this was part of a disturbing trend of Jewish parents pulling their children out of government schools in Melbourne.

"There is mounting evidence that families are forced to take their children out of public schools and to enrol them in Jewish-day schools due to a growing sense of insecurity and fear that their kids will be harmed simply because of who they are," Dr Abramovich said.

Mr Abramovich has been helping the mother of the 12-year-old boy to find another school for her daughter, because she does not want to send her to Cheltenham Secondary College.

The Education Department has been contacted for commen

SOURCE