Be Careful What You Wish For: Pending Privatization of Australian Higher Education (original) (raw)

The Stairway to the Top: The Remuneration of Academic Executives

Australian Journal of Management, 2008

Australian universities have in recent times been undergoing a substantial transformation in the way in which they are managed. They have moved away from the (British-based) traditional collegiate model to one in which professional managers play a centre-stage role. This paper investigates an important element of the managerialism at Australian universities, the market for what we call ‘academic executives' (AEs). We analyse the remuneration of the top AEs at Australian universities over the past six years and show that institutional size is a dominant driving factor of remuneration, as has been found with compensation of CEOs in the private sector. We also find the pay-size elasticity to be about 0.25 and is the same for both the university and private sectors; and remarkably, this value has also been found in previous studies on executive remuneration for the US and the UK. The remuneration schedule for the university sector is about half as steep as that for the private secto...

Exploring Academic Salaries in a Comparative Context

International Higher Education, 2015

In 2007, the Boston College Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) launched an exploratory project attempting to do just that— collecting and comparing salary data (in World Bank PPP dollars) from 15 countries and one territory. We looked at target countries' relative positions on the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Program for comparative analysis. In terms of salary progressions over the course of a career, our data show that faculty in wealthier, more developed countries tend to enjoy greater potential for salary growth with some exceptions. Comparing faculty salaries to average per capita–income estimates indicates that the academic profession pays well in many parts of the developing world. Given this simple reality, faculty salaries stand out as a subtle but important consideration in any national development conversation and in the race for international relevance.

Academic Salaries and Contracts: What Do We Know?

International Higher Education, 2015

Data in this article are from Paying the Professoriate: A Global Comparison of Compensation and Contracts, ed- ited by Philip G. Altbach, Liz Reisberg, Maria Yudkevich, Gregory Androushchak, and Iván F. Pacheco (New York: Routlege, 2012). Additional data can be found on the project Web site: http://acarem.hse.ru. This research resulted from a collaboration between the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College and the Laboratory of Institutional Analysis at the National Research University– Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.