Five-star expense claims of university bosses
The Office for Students should put an end to the racket that leaves students poorer but unemployed
LUXURY hampers, sticks of rock and a “porn star Martini” are among some of the items university vice-chancellors have claimed for on their expenses, an investigation has found.
Senior managers, who are already under fire over the size of their salaries, have claimed almost £8million in expenses over a two-year period.
Managers enjoyed first-class fights, five-star hotel stays and fine dining as they toured the world promoting their institutions. They also claimed for gifts ranging from luxury cushions and mugs to silver salvers. One university paid £1,600 to transport its vice-chancellor’s dog from Australia.
Professor Steve West, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol, claimed £43,000 in 18 months – with around £10,000 spent on chauffeur-driven cars.
Prof West is also on the board of the Office for Students (OFS), the higher education regulator, which is expected to have new powers that will see it tackle high pay in universities, grade inflation, teaching quality, dropout rates and the financial stability of institutions. A spokesman for the UWE said Prof West’s role with the OFS and with the Higher Education Funding Council for England required him to travel.
Details of the lavish spending habits of the heads of higher education establishments come at a time when lecturers are staging a month of walkouts in a dispute over pensions.
The figures were obtained by Channel 4’s Dispatches through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Of the 157 universities approached, eight, including Cambridge and Leeds, declined to cooperate and five, including Manchester and Oxford, did not respond.
Southampton University had the highest expense claims, amounting to £400,000 for 17 of its senior managers. A spokesman for the university said all the claims were legitimate.
International travel accounted for a large portion of the expenses, with Sir Keith Burnett, vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield, claiming £3,107.54 for a five-night stay at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Singapore.
The FOI requests also uncovered details of smaller items, including a set of £32.50 Laura Ashley mugs and a drink called a “porn star Martini”, which both appeared on the expenses of senior figures at Leeds Trinity University. When Professor Max Lu joined the University of Surrey from Queensland University in Australia, the British institution gave him a £15,000 relocation package, which included £1,600 to fly his Maltese terrier dog Oscar to the UK.
Defending the payment, a spokesman said it was part of “reasonable relocation expenses”.
Senior managers at Brighton University submitted a claim for sticks of rock. Universities rake in almost £17billion a year from students, who pay up to £9,250 a year in tuition fees. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: “The lack of selfawareness while [senior managers] feather their own nests yet hold down staff pay, use insecure contracts and try to slash pensions, is quite staggering.”
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “Universities have the freedom to manage their own finances, but students and taxpayers rightly expect value for money in how they operate. Expenses should, in all cases, be reasonable.”
Dispatches – Britain’s University Spending Scandal will be broadcast on Channel 4 tonight at 8pm.
When it’s discovered that a car company has been lying about the cars it sells, or that a bank has been tricking customers into buying complex and useless financial products, the usual result is a massive and deserved scandal. Yet much as we love to hate banks and car-makers, they are not the perpetrators of Britain’s biggest mis-selling scandal. That honour falls to Britain’s university sector.
Last week saw the first 14 days of planned strikes by university lecturers, who are unhappy that their pension scheme (deficit: £7.5 billion) intends to abolish its defined benefit guarantee, in the way that almost every responsible private pension fund has already done. The changes are certainly painful, but they are also prudent – and while lecturers agitate for cash, it’s students who are being ripped off.
Debate about universities tends to focus relentlessly on tuition fees or student debt interest rates. That was the subject of the Government’s “review” of higher education, also announced last week. In this political ding-dong, Tories tend to point to the extra money fees have successfully brought into the universities system. Labour, in turn, point out the huge personal debt burden that students are taking on to fund it.
In truth, both are only looking at one piece of the puzzle. The really important question is not how much a degree costs, but whether the cost of one represents value for money. Are students (and, ultimately, taxpayers) getting a good enough return on their investment? The short answer is no.
On the one hand, Britain’s elite universities are doing well. Overall, getting a degree still generates a premium. Graduates earn more and are more likely to be employed than school-leavers, and that’s as true now, with 43 per cent of young people going to university, as it was when only
13 per cent went back in 1993. This happy aggregate picture obscures a huge divergence, however. While the premium for those at the top is going up, millions of students graduating from lesser institutions are being mis-sold degrees on a massive scale.
Official figures show that one in five graduates aren’t in jobs that require a degree even three to five years after leaving. In other words, they took on all that debt for nothing. Unsurprisingly, a third of undergraduates in England think their course is poor value for money. Meanwhile, businesses still report widespread skills shortages, even though, on paper, the UK has one of the most skilled workforces in the world.
You’d never know this from researching degree options. The sale of courses to students is a brisk business, aided by a merry-go-round of lavish awards. Take the University of East London’s architecture course. Courses offered by its “award-winning” department, it boasts, are ranked second in London by The Guardian’s university league table. Scroll down – and down and down – and you find a link to the official data, showing that six months after graduating a shocking 23 per cent of its former students are unemployed, against a national average of 4 per cent. Only half have jobs (the balance are getting further degrees) and of these only half have “professional or managerial” jobs. For the privilege of getting this degree, students will pay top dollar – £9,250 a year. Given how many graduates of some courses might well end up as baristas or Uber drivers, earning under the threshold to pay the debt back, this liability ends up squarely on the public balance sheet. The hapless student becomes a conduit for cash to flow directly from HM Government into university coffers.
This isn’t the worst of it. A few years ago, the Competition and Markets Authority had to step in formally to stop universities misleading students by unilaterally changing the content of their courses without warning or threatening to withhold degrees if debts such as library fines were unpaid. Meanwhile, accommodation costs are skyrocketing: surveys by the National Union of Students found that they rose 18 per cent in the three years to 2015. And the OECD has found that an astonishing 7 per cent of students in England leave university with low “basic skills” (literacy and numeracy). Can there be anything more cynical for a university than admitting a student who cannot read or add simply so that it can collect a big fat cheque?
The biggest question, of course, is where the hell all the money is going (other than to vice chancellors’ salaries and benefits, of course). Non-science courses tend to offer students a mere 10 hours’ instruction a week (the rest is “independent study”). It costs about £5,000 a year to educate an A-level pupil full-time, so how on earth does it cost nearly double that to offer a fraction of the class time to students?
Fortunately, the Government already passed some of the legislation needed to tackle the problem last May. Up to now, universities have primarily been ranked by the quality of their research. This year, the Office for Students (OFS) is due to start scrutinising the quality of the education students are getting.
This task is vitally important. The Ofs’s first task should be to boost the visibility and reliability of official data about course outcomes. Measures such as students’ employment prospects and the improvement in their knowledge and skills should be the most prominent and important data for schools advising pupils on their options. Failing universities should be put into special measures or shut.
Secondly, the OFS must open the field to more competition. Higher education is changing and all sorts of non-traditional organisations are keen to disrupt the market, from cordon bleu to Google to the big four accountancy firms. Students should be able to crunch their education into a shorter timeframe, switch easily between courses if it’s not working out and get degrees online or while working. This will require dismantling universities’ monopolistic stranglehold. Currently, new organisations that want to award degrees have to get permission from existing degree-awarding institutions. Last May’s legislation was meant to change this, but the initial guidance given by the Department for Education errs towards the status quo.
The vested interests arrayed against change are enormous and powerful. University administrators are a well-connected bunch. But universities that offer value for money should have nothing to fear. The OFS needs guts to change things, but most of all, it needs political backing. If Theresa May is serious about helping students, she should make a crackdown on failure the centrepiece of her reforms.