214 University Staff Earn Over £100,000 A Year

A series of FOI requests from the Taxpayers Alliance have revealed the number of university staff who fall within various pay brackets.

The Vice-Chancellor takes home the highest salary, a whopping £280,000 PA including a performance payment of around £30,000.

15 more staff members are paid in excess of £200,000, with a huge 79 staff paid £150,000 or more. A further 120 staff were paid more than £100,000.

A university spokesperson has been quoted as saying “The University of Southampton is a world-leading teaching and research institution with over 23,000 students and 5,000 members of staff. It is appropriate that senior managers and senior academics of such a large, complex and successful international institution are competitively remunerated”.

“It is also important to point out that institutions like the University of Southampton, and other UK universities, receive considerably less income from the public purse year-on-year following numerous government reforms to the funding of higher education in recent years.”

Lecturers threatened to go on strike due to pay issues as recently as October 2013

The university is hardly struggling for money, with a Soton Tab investigation finding that we have a £133 million surplus in reserve. With a record intake of students this year the University is clearly making an effort to expand, as high salaries will attract the best lecturers and academics.

But with many students still struggling to make ends meet questions will be raised regarding how much of this surplus is trickling down to students, especially given apparently rising food prices and the removal of the entitlement scheme for incoming students.