the boss at UTS, a Aussie Uni makes $900,000+, seems over paid to me. Overseas students pay for a lot of it, now fewer Taiwanese students think it is too expensive and has bad value. As well as cites become bad with too many immigrants and people.
They are running a large business. Seems fine to me and of the order of UK and us vc/pres salaries.
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Definitely overpaid.
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Seems pretty standard… if not on the low side.
Australian university vice-chancellors are among the highest-paid in the world, with average salaries exceeding $1 million to $1.3 million per year. As of 2023-2024, top earners like those at the University of Canberra ($1.785M) and Monash University ($1.565M) exceed these averages. Salaries have quadrupled since 1985, often surpassing those of global peers, sparking calls for pay caps.
Key Findings on Vice-Chancellor Remuneration
Top Earners (2023-2024 data): University of Canberra ($1.785M), Monash University ($1.565M), University of Melbourne ($1.447M–$1.6M), UNSW ($1.322M), and Flinders University ($1.315M).
Go8 Focus: Group of Eight (Go8) university leaders often receive close to or above $1.3 million per year.
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It’s an Executive position in a country with relatively high salaries.
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Australia has done a good job at escaping the wokification of higher education, but they have still not been able to maintain quality higher education. As with other countries, university leaders lean heavily on easy money from international students, but with the drops in quality that cannot last and already Chinese students are seeing that overseas degrees are not helping them get jobs anymore. As China develops higher ed and if Australia cuts back heavily on international student visas, we will see the same thing that we see in Canada
Add to that the AI cliff, and any university president who can successfully navigate the next 10 years is worth the money. I’m guessing such people are rare
Bingo. Folks pay a lot to multinational CEOs to lead. Within the minefield of AI, less international students, Byzantine politics, dwindling humanities enrollment, etc., good ones are absolutely worth the coin.
But to date, the track record is just sucking on taxpayer money and international students and the idea that people need a university degree to get ahead. The landscape has shifted, now we find out who’s worth money and who’s overpaid.
So everyone gets to be overpaid.
If u underpay, evry lower guy gets underpaid
Mehh they are in a leadership position in well known universities in attractive countries , already a well oiled machine and with well established governance and bureaucracy, students aren’t going to stop going to good unis no matter whose in the top position It’s not that hard not to fuck it up.
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You are aware of how that is being ginned up, right? It’s a deliberatedly engineered decision from the top, and not from student demand.
Guy
They do at times seem hell bent on trying, though.
Guy
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They seem to be gravy train positions with a lot of socialising with government and corporates.
Some Vice Chancellor’s can get all caught up in that, and start believing the hype. Then fall because of a budget or political scandal.
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I’m thinking of what this looks like from the ground, say from a student perspective or from the point of view of a lecturer.
An anecdote I recently heard about the latter: a lecturer with what looked like a good gig in an Australian uni left to go to North America. Why? The uni had mandated that students have the right NOT to go to class and the lecturer MUST record a lecture in advance and upload it online. With this arrangement, the uni administration effectively doubled the workload, with the lecturer having to record and upload the lecture in advance, and then show up to a massive lecture hall (seating several hundred students) to meet a handful that actually wanted to show up.
This arrangement did not exactly inspire confidence for someone committed to education. They left the position.
Guy
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In practice the lectures are normally recorded live on the day…. And streamed live too.
Many times streamed live and recorded with no one physically present, this can be difficult for some academics who prefer engagement.
Many courses have moved away from lecture format to online seminars to resolve this.
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The situation sounds really unfun, honestly speaking, especially if engagement / interaction is viewed as part of how education works.
And yes I am posting anecdotally. My point is simply that the system in Australia, as designed by some administrators, does not seem that great when viewed from a distance.
More serious that all this is the Scott Morrison era decision to punish anyone who wants to read and study history, philosophy, languages, literature, and so on, as I linked above with the ABC report from November 2025. This looks like a recipe to produce an ill-informed and illiterate society, which as we’ve seen across the pond in the US may be the point.
Guy
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When I was young the format was lectures and tutorials… lectures weren’t mandatory, tutorials were.
There wasn’t much if any engagement in physical lectures the audiences were too large.
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Keep in mind these figures are in Australian monopoly money not hard currency
1.3m AUD per year would be 2.4m NTD per month.
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Yes, still overpaid.
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