There’s a raging debate on the financial and quality crises of the UK’s tertiary education system with particular reference to new universities, many of which are upgraded polytechnics rather than traditional multi-disciplinary universities. The evidence indicates massive failure of management in higher education institutions. Yet so many of the captains who are running many of the sinking ships onto financial rocks, are personally equipped with golden lifejackets. I refer to the pay of university vice chancellors, recently described by the London Daily Mail correspondent Dominic Sandbrook as “robber barons of our age”.

One of Sandbrook’s betes-noires is Dominic Shellard, a professor of post-war British theatre (hardly one of the more impressive academic subjects!) who until recently reigned over Leicester’s De Montfort University. Despite the university’s appalling financial condition, Shellard’s salary (excluding impressive perks) increased by 22 percent last year to a massive £350,000 (Rs.3.2 crore) — more than six times the amount senior lecturers earn and well over ten times the average pay of his academic staff.

Yet Shellard is only one of our many academic robber barons. Cambridge and Oxford pay basic salaries (plus eye-watering perks) of £431,000 (Rs.3.9 crore) and £350,000 (Rs.3.2 crore) respectively to their vice chancellors, and while this is too much, there is some excuse for what are the top two universities in the latest 2019 Times Higher Education global league table. But what are we to make of the £400,000 (Rs.3.6 crore) paid to a former professor of citizenship (sic) and incumbent vice chancellor of London’s Birkbeck College, sixth from the bottom of the THE UK league table?

The plain truth is that UK’s dysfunctional tertiary education system needs massive repair, including closure and/or merger of several higher education institutions and possibly widespread privatisation through which universities would become accountable to shareholders. Even then, UK tertiary education will have to avoid the dead hand of government interference that EW has often and rightly castigated as undermining excellent private education institutions in India. But at least we won’t be any worse off than we are now, and private owners would be less likely to tolerate ‘robber baron’ vice chancellors.

My advice to Indian students planning to apply to UK universities is to research prospective institutions carefully. Many struggling universities — especially the newer and poor-quality ones — are so heavily dependent on foreign students that they are demanding lenient immigration rules to let more in and are, as Sandbrook says, “handing out Firsts like sweets”. Attractive as it may seem to study somewhere that makes it easy to get high grades, do you really want to spend your money on poor tuition and a qualification of questionable value? Catastrophe is looming for many such universities, and good employers aren’t stupid.

(Dr. Peter Greenhalgh is a Cambridge classical scholar and former professor at Cape Town University)