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Part 1
Analysis
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1
Academic Remuneration and Contracts
Global Trends and Realities
Philip G. Altbach, Liz Reisberg, and Iván F. Pacheco
The academic profession is at the central core of the university. Without a strong, well-educated, and committed professoriate, no academic institution or higher education system can be successful. Yet, the profession now faces enormous challenges. The massification of enrollments, privatization, growing pressures for accountability, increased global competition for talent, and the economic downturn combine to influence national policies that define higher education. Furthermore, academic staff are being asked to deal with the broad range of needs of a more diverse student population. Worsening conditions of employment, deteriorating salaries, and threats to job security have made the academic profession less attractive to young scholars in some countries, while other countries are performing a concerted effort to make salaries and working conditions more appealing.
The matters of concern mainly include key elements of salaries, remuneration, and the terms and conditions of academic work—the core of academic appointments. Without significant salaries and appropriate contracts and conditions of service, the profession cannot thrive—and indeed cannot perform quite well. Without conditions that permit a secure career, competitive with alternatives in the labor market, the entire academic enterprise will falter. In most countries, within this study as well as in much of the world, academic staff supplement their base salary with added income earned by means of teaching overloads, research productivity, nonacademic work, teaching in multiple institutions, or administrative service. The contemporary university in most countries finds itself in crisis, in part based on the risks faced by the academic profession (Altbach 2003).
This book is based on a study of the academic profession in 28 countries, on all continents. With so many new forces shaping higher education globally, the academic profession may face new challenges and serious risks. Moreover, in higher education compensation and careers are at the heart of the contemporary crisis worldwide.
The Academic Revolution and the Academic Profession
Much has been investigated about the academic revolution of the 21st century (Altbach, Reisberg, and Rumbley 2010; Task Force on Higher Education and Society 2000; Altbach 1996). The contemporary transformation of higher education presents direct implications for the academic profession. Three key forces are of special relevance for the academic profession. Massification has transformed higher education everywhere. In the first decade of the 21st century, global enrollments grew from 100 million to 150 million. Continued growth will impact India and China dramatically, along with sub-Saharan Africa. In much of Europe, parts of East Asia, and North America, however, higher education systems have matured and are no longer significantly expanding. In some countries, the age cohort that traditionally enrolled in higher education is actually shrinking. This shift formed implications for the academic profession, as well. Higher education is no longer an elite enterprise, and this new reality has had dramatic implications for the academic profession.
The global knowledge economy, made possible by the revolution in information technology, has also affected higher education and the academic profession. Research has become a key function of the top-tier universities worldwide, creating new options and challenges for academics at the top of the profession. Both massification and the knowledge economy have created diversification of higher education, with segments devoted mainly to teaching and providing access to students, while a smaller segment focuses on research.
Institutional diversification has led to a fracturing of the academic profession into many segments and to the decline of a sense of the academic community. Burton Clark, referring to the United States, wrote of the professoriate divided into “small worlds, different worlds”—the various subcultures and circumstances of the profession in a complex academic system (Clark 1987). At top research universities, the working conditions, salaries, and roles of the elite professors, in most countries, differ greatly from the jobs of staff who teach at mass-access institutions, who are lower in the academic pecking order and who now constitute the large majority of the academic workforce. Increasingly, remuneration and working conditions of faculty members in new high-demand areas—such as business studies or information technology—are quite different from those in the humanities. The academic profession of the 21st century is, without question, less of a community than it was in the past. Size alone makes the community problematical, along with the enormous diversity in the academic profession. There were at least 6 million postsecondary teachers worldwide in 2007, and the number is increasing rapidly to match growing enrollments (Altbach, Reisberg, and Rumbley 2010, 228–33).
Increased demands for accountability, greater attention to serving the vocational needs of students, the shortcomings of preuniversity education, and other pressures have added to the challenges facing the academic profession. International competition for talent and institutional prestige has created new tensions as international pressures often conflict with local needs.
The dramatic rise of the private sector in higher education has affected the professoriate. Private higher education, for-profit and nonprofit, is now the fastestgrowing segment of postsecondary education worldwide and constitutes the majority of enrollments in parts of Latin America and Asia. Although many of the faculty who teach in the private sector also hold positions at public universities, some alterations exist among academic circumstances at private universities. Globally, the terms and conditions of academic appointments in the private sector vary and are sometimes less favorable than in public universities. In some countries, the private sector will pay more but offer less attractive working conditions, demanding more teaching hours with no compensation or time allocated for research, preparation, advising, or other types of service.
Finally, globalization has facilitated the increased mobility of talent, especially for academics at the top of the prestige hierarchy. The countries in this book (for the most part) divide into two categories—brain drain and brain gain. South Africa is in the unusual position of being in both categories, gaining talent from the African region but also losing top talent to Europe and other moredeveloped countries. Countries with greater resources are able to draw talent from weaker economies. Traditionally, this quality has been to the advantage of institutions in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe; but new players (Saudi Arabia and China, for example) have entered the global competition for top researchers and scholars. This situation works to the detriment of weaker economies—such as, Armenia, Latvia, and Ethiopia—where resources are limited but the need for talent is at least as strong.
Confronting New Realities
As noted previously, several trends have converged to change the higher education landscape and, as a result, the conditions of academic work and the profession. With few exceptions, enrollment has expanded dramatically in the developing countries included in this book. Rapid enrollment expansion created an urgent need for more seats, infrastructure, and academic staff.
Most of the developed countries in this study—Australia, Canada, France, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States—were transformed by enrollment expansion several decades ago and are now relatively stable. Japan stands out as a developed country that now confronts the challenges of having expanded beyond its current needs and finds itself with excess capacity and staff.
In all countries, periods of rapid expansion increased the demand for teaching institutions and academic staff who would teach. The result has been an ongoing tension between the priorities of higher education. The greater need requires academic staff to teach the expanding numbers of students in classrooms, while prestige and value continue to be measured by research productivity. Despite the growing segment of higher education dedicated exclusively to teaching, salary, promotion, and other rewards are more often based on research productivity and rarely on teaching performance. International prestige that emanates from rankings is greatly influenced by research achievement, and this, in turn, often influences national policy and budget allocation.
In countries where higher education was historically limited to or dominated by publically supported institutions, governments have opened the door to private providers in order to address growing enrollment demand. Private universities (with rare exceptions) tend to be entirely devoted to teaching. Private universities, often for-profit, now account for a growing share of enrollment in countries where this sector was previously insignificant, if not nonexistent— including Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Ethiopia, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, and the Czech Republic. As already noted, this sector has also become a source of supplementary employment for academic staff in the public sector. This research was limited by the general lack of data provided by the private sector in nearly all countries, particularly in regard to salaries and remuneration. The private sector, in general, seemed to be less transparent and less accountable than the public sector.
Patterns of Academic Appointments and Contracts
Patterns of appointment and contracts vary widely across the globe, but the academic profession remains a remarkably stable career as well as one that provides considerable social prestige—even if not always a reasonable standard of living. But the profile of the academic workforce has changed in recent decades. The academic community is not only much larger but also much more diverse than in the past.
The urgency of increasing coverage for expanded enrollment in so many countries has strained budget and human resource capacity nearly everywhere. The challenges of filling so many new positions at a time of worldwide fiscal austerity have resulted in several notable trends and patterns.
The need has generally been addressed by greater numbers of part-time or full-time, fixed-contract academic hires. Even systems with a strong tradition of hiring academic staff on a tenure track, or with permanent civil service hiring arrangements, are moving toward more fixed-term appointments. In the United States, for example, half of the new appointments to academic posts are either part-time or full-time contract employees (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006). Western Europe seems least affected by the trend toward part-time academic staff, although numbers are growing there as well.
Interestingly, although relatively few countries included in this research have formal tenure systems, most full- and part-time academic staff are renewed as a matter of course. Tenure systems tend to have well-defined norms for determining when contracts will be renewed, with a clearly defined threshold to permanence. In systems without formal tenure, surprisingly, academic staff, particularly part time, are infrequently subject to a formal and comprehensive review of their relevant activities and are rarely dismissed. In only a few countries (Germany, Japan, and the United States) are the terms of continuance clear and quite strict and are academic staff routinely forced to leave a position.
Additionally, developing countries in particular were hard pressed to fill openings for staff that held advanced degrees. In many countries in this study, entry-level positions in the academic hierarchy are filled by teachers with only a first degree. Indeed, the first university degree (the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree) may be the average academic qualification for those teaching in postsecondary education worldwide today. It should be noted, however, that this was also common in the past, before massification in countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia), where graduate programs were sparse. Where graduate programs have expanded nationally, more countries require new hires to have advanced degrees, and younger faculty are more likely to have such degrees. The doctorate, a requirement for almost all academic appointments—in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States for the past century—has now become a requirement for appointments at research universities everywhere.
Hiring practices tend to follow a similar pattern, often outlined in national legislation; opportunities are announced in the national press and open to all candidates. Typically, institutions maintain considerable autonomy in determining when they have openings and how they are promoted and filled. In a few countries (France, for example) included in the research, candidates must be reviewed at the national level before they can be considered for a specific academic position, but this is not a common practice.
Despite a trend toward making the hiring process more competitive and transparent, individuals are still often hired through personal networks or offered temporary contracts that bypass the formal public contest system. In Argentina, academic staff can be hired more quickly under “interim contracts,” bypassing a public competition; Colombia does the same, by hiring temporary or occasional staff. Even when vacancies are announced publicly and where formal procedures exist for hiring new staff, positions are often filled internally, with faculty from lower ranks or with the university’s own graduates contributing to “inbreeding” (i.e., hiring some of its own graduates) in many countries. In Russia, the head of a chair uses his or her considerable autonomy to make hiring choices, including often his or her own PhD students. Likewise, Armenian universities give preference to their own students, when hiring. Japan tends to rely on personal connections for appointment to entry-level academic posts. Indeed, the observation from the research data is that inbreeding in both initial hiring and in promotions is a common practice.
Conditions that encourage inbreeding constitute tradition, the lack of a national market, the absence of financial incentives to move, and significantly less attractive working conditions elsewhere. Most analysts feel that such a scheme is a detriment to academic creativity, since it emphasizes the continuity of ideas and practice rather than innovation. This practice also stresses academic hierarchy, because younger scholars, trained by their elders, simply fit into existing arrangements. At the s...
