High Earners, Low Funding

YESTERDAY THE Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn outlined a range of spending cuts across the education sector.

These cuts will impose further strains on an under-funded Irish education system. In Ireland, average spending per student at all levels of education is among the lowest of the OECD countries: only 16 per cent of GDP is spent on education.

Despite this, the high earnings of an elite group of academics and administrators remains one of the striking features of the Irish education system.

In September, Quinn told the Dáil how 191 people in the third-level sector were earning in excess of €150,000. More recently, he confirmed that of the 99 employees in the higher education sector receiving in excess of €200,000 per annum, 89 are academic medical consultants, a majority of whom are jointly paid by the HSE and their university.

Today, The Irish Timesdetails the names and positions of those earning €150,000 or more in the third-level sector. The survey is published amid increasing controversy about high pay levels in the relatively under-funded Irish education sector.

Close to 80 per cent of the €9 billion education budget is absorbed by pay and pensions. But this is off limits to the Government because of the Croke Park deal on public service reform.

Last year, The Irish Timespublished a list of the top 100 earners in the Irish education sector, including university presidents, deans and senior administrative staff. The survey highlighted the relatively high pay levels for academics and bureaucrats, especially at senior levels.

Fianna Fáil has called for the pay of all public servants to be reduced to a maximum of €200,000 and €250,000 for all semi-State executives, specifically highlighting the high salaries paid to academic consultants. Sinn Féin has gone further, calling for all public service salaries to be capped at €100,000.

Institute of Technology presidents and senior university administrative staff feature prominently in the list of those earning between €150,000 and €199,999. But when the focus shifts to those earning €200,000 and over, it is comprised almost exclusively of academic clinicians.

The list hints at the priorities of individual universities. The largest numbers of people earning €150,000 and over are employed at UCC. Most are medics or dentists. The high number of dental consultants at UCC inflates the figure. Dr Michael Murphy, the highest-paid university president in the country, is on a salary of €232,000.

UCD, the largest university in the Republic, employs 31 people earning €150,000 or over. Six of these, including UCD president Hugh Brady, are senior administrative staff. The remainder are medics.

Trinity College employs 32 people who earn €150,000 or over, including two physicists and four senior administrative staff. There are 31 staff earning €150,000 or more at NUI Galway: four administrative staff including the university president, one professor of Irish, and 26 medics.

The salary of many clinicians is split between their university and the Health Service Executive, and therefore does not come entirely from the education budget. In almost all cases, the universities pay the wages of academic clinicians and are reimbursed by the HSE.

However, the total salary cost comes from the public purse.

The University of Limerick recently pointed to Government pay scales for medical consultants to explain why the advertised remuneration for the new head of the graduate entry medical school is amongst the highest academic salaries in the State.

How do academics and consultants respond to publication of our education salary survey?

– Martin Varley, secretary general of the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association, stated that medical academics have a very heavy workload and a high level of responsibility.

“Medical academics, in addition to managing very busy academic departments, also run demanding clinical practices in our teaching hospitals,” he said.

“They are the acknowledged medical experts and leaders in their universities and hospitals and are highly sought after internationally. Both for the immediate and the longer term, it is of critical importance that Ireland attracts and retains medical academics, who are leading developments in their specialties to improve patient care in hospitals and medical school teaching programmes.

“Medical academics, who are responsible for teaching medicine, hold joint contracts with universities and hospitals, so they are engaged in the practice of medicine at the front line, as well as being responsible for medical school faculties and significant research programmes.”

– Dr Ronan Boland:president of the Irish Medical Organisation, said that most academic physicians could earn considerably more in centres abroad, and that a few had left Ireland due to the lack of funding and supports, bringing their research with them.

“The average age of appointment of consultants in Ireland is 38. Those taking up academic posts may be older still, and both are typically older when appointed than in most other countries. It is likely that their potential lifetime earnings are often less than in other highly paid professions,” he added.

A selection of further responses is included below .

– Peter Cantillon, NUI Galway:"My post is one of several academic clinician posts created in Ireland as a direct result of the recommendations of the Fottrell report on Irish undergraduate medical education (2006).

The purpose of the academic clinician posts was to increase academic/ educational capacity in Irish medical schools in the context of increases in medical student numbers and the implementation of new more student-centred curricular models. My post is 50 per cent funded by the HEA and 50 per cent funded by the HSE.”

– Professor Michael O'Dwyer,who receives 27 per cent of his salary from NUI Galway, said: outlined his experience, adding:

“Between grant funding, industry support and charitable support, I have brought in over €1 one million to NUIG for research, which has provided employment, research training opportunities and tangible outputs in terms of publications.

Much of my own academic efforts are conducted out of hours at home as I neither have sufficient time, nor have been provided with even an office by NUIG, to undertake my research.

“All in all, I consider that I am providing excellent value to the taxpayer for the salary I currently receive from NUIG and could easily match this overseas, where I have worked in academia before with considerably more resources than I now have, but have committed to staying in Ireland and trying to improve the standard of healthcare and translational research in this country.”

– Professor Emmet Andrews, UCC:"Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your query . . . I currently work 65-75 hours per week in a job that carries a considerable responsibility and is fully accountable.

“In UCC, we are teaching 25 per cent more medical students this year compared to last year.

For these posts I have trained since I left school in 1988 until I started here in July 2010, and have spent approximately €175,000 on postgraduate degrees and courses, training courses, exams, conferences etc, in order to be adequately trained and competitive.

“While I think it is important that we all know what our public taxes are spent on, I don’t know if listing people’s individual salaries gives an accurate reflection of value for money or encourages individuals to do their best in the public interest.

“What is the easiest way to a high-earning post essentially? Surgery certainly is not it! For instance, surgeons in the USA are paid an average of US$300,000 (€223,000) per annum and in Australia AUS$300,000 (€229,000) and, of course, pay considerably less tax and spend considerably less time in training.

“If we want the best and most suitable people to work here as doctors (or in any profession), there has to be a realisation that we need to expect to pay appropriately. In what profession is this of most importance?”

– Louise Kenny, UCC:"I feel I should also point out that for my salary, I work in excess of 100 hours each week, providing clinical care and undertaking research in a neglected area of medicine. I have raised over €5 five million in peer-reviewed grant awards in the last five years at UCC and my research team has received numerous international accolades for its our work into the causes and treatment of pre-eclampsia.

“I am repeatedly invited to relocate to more prestigious universities overseas and for salaries often double or more that which I currently earn. I am, however, committed to UCC and to improving both clinical care for pregnant women and vulnerable babies through translational research here in Ireland.

“A pregnant woman somewhere in the world dies every minute and every third minute the cause is pre-eclampsia. Sadly, I suspect these facts are far less newsworthy than your erroneous story about my salary and that of my other clinical academic colleagues.”

Two professors spoke under condition of anonymity:"This is very interesting and I am pleased that someone is demonstrating how privileged some of us are financially.

“It is a shame that our newly-qualified doctors do not think that our work conditions are sufficiently privileged to remain in Ireland. This would also be an interesting public debate. Should we demand that they work in Ireland, since the State has largely paid for their education? Is the public satisfied that when they come to “centres of excellence” that they are being treated by doctors that have been trained elsewhere, and certainly in universities that are not international centres of excellence as are ours, and in the main do not have English as their first language?

(The medic then cited that she had trained as a medic before training for a further five years in her speciality, in addition to three years for a PhD, before taking on further responsibilities and training.)

“I do not do any private practice and have a huge mortgage because I returned to Ireland during the boom years to buy an overpriced house. My story is typical of academic consultants.”

“Thank you for your e-mail and for taking interest in academics. I am at the top point of full professor scale . . . If you would like to look at my P60, I have no problem in sharing this with you.

“In my view, it would be beneficial if the public had better appreciation of academics’ jobs. Media can play role in explaining what professors do. This would stimulate public interest in science and innovation. There is much misconception there. There is perception that academics do only teaching and then take a lot of time off during the summer. The work of academics is very interesting, busy and it gives huge moral satisfaction when produces results.

“Like many research-driven professors, I have flexibility in relation to day-to-day time management, but the other side of the coin is that it takes heavy time commitment. I only take seven to 7- 10 days off on holidays during the entire year, and people in the college know that I am in the office even during week of 25th-30th December 25th-30th.

Weekend travel or meetings is a part of the job. There are many different aspects to the job. (The professor, who earns slightly more than €150,000 per year, adds that he works 60-hour weeks all year round, teaches up to 200 students, supervises 12 PhD students, publishes numerous papers every year, files several patent applications, typically prepares one research proposal for funding each month, deals with intellectual property, raises research funds, works with companies, brings research to market, reports on current projects, maintains continuous assessment for approximately 100 students, manages several laboratories, and travels to conferences.)

“I think there are much bigger issues in relation to education that need to be debated, more important than salaries of selected academics. . . There is huge structural imbalance in the profile of specialists graduating from Irish third-level institutions (with too many arts graduates and not enough engineering graduates). . . I understand you need my salary figure to publish it. That is fine.”