Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousDan | Hacker News Reader

In the UK at least there is huge discontent about the recent pension cuts. The salaries already suck (especially in a technical field such as CS), but a 40% cut to pensions as a reward for the efforts put in to handle COVID is just too much.

View on HN

The salaries suck but this is the UK. If you’re in the correct social class to be an academic you should have your own independent means, and use your academic salary as nothing more than rent for the townhouse you’re staying in while away from your country estate. /s

(Somehow this is both sarcasm and the literal situation of people I know.)

I'm in academia in London at the moment and this really struck true. All the senior staff bought their houses for pennies 30 years ago which are now worth millions, and don't seem to understand why the more junior staff are so worked up about salaries. Rent is 50% of our pay cheque and any house within an hours commute is 10x annual salary.

A potential alternative could be that the university provides lodging to its staff for a subsidized rent. This way, salaries don't have to be increased.

I mean: a lot of universities provide dorms for their students, why not for parts of their staff, too?

Would you want your employer to have full control of not only your income, but also the roof over your head?

When I was a postdoc at Oxford there was an article in one of the university magazines complaining that full professors could no longer afford one of the lovely giant late-Victorian villas in North Oxford that used to be occupied by academics.

Hilariously, it turns out that was always the case. The profs with the fancy houses were never doing it on their university salaries; they were doing it on family money. Meanwhile, one of my colleagues resigned and left because he couldn't afford to pay rent for him and his partner in Oxford on a postdoc salary. Plus ça change...

I wish someone had told me that before spending a chunk of my career to get a permanent academic post!

My understanding, as well, is that as much as the tenure track situation in NA is on the disastrous side of bleak, the European and specifically UK tenure track (or equivalent) situation is almost worse.

I know you pointed out salaries, but the vast majority of junior academics are not interested in chasing higher salaries. They are there for their research and the opportunities to pursue that research.

Yeah, I'd expect anyone who can get out of the field to do so in the UK; the pensions fiasco is the opposite of a staff retention effort, and in general the profession suffers from a lack of respect.

> huge discontent about the recent pension cuts

I get this, but these are almost all ponzi schemes when "guaranteed" by the government or some form of bureaucracy. We deal with it in the US. Chicago and Philadelphia public pensions are underwater with no way to solve the problem, so elected officials kick the can down the road until it blows up.

Wrong. In the UK the universities collectively are part of USS, the biggest private pension fund in the UK The annoying thing is that this was in rude health until the university management controlled board decided to take a pension valuation during the middle of COVID. The driving factor is that 10 years or so ago the university sector was deregulated such that universities are no longer capped in terms of the number of students they can take. This has lead to vicious competition between universities to hoover up as many students as possible. As a result they are no longer willing to cross-subsidize each others pension funds.

>> As a result they are no longer willing to cross-subsidize each others pension funds.

>> universities are no longer capped in terms of the number of students they can take

>> Some form of bureaucracy

Fair enough, was just pointing out it's not (primarily) a government backed scheme (in theory at least).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com