In the Middle Ages academics at Oxford and Cambridge were not paid salaries but were paid, often in food and drink, for each session of teaching. Even today, a master’s gown has long sleeves with deep pockets formerly used to carry payments in kind.
Academics are still paid badly, if not in food, then in subsistence salaries. Underpayment of academics is common worldwide and so it was not surprising to see a recent social media post claiming that a lecturer at a private university in Terengganu was earning just RM1,200 per month without EPF.
Any honest academic will confirm universities pay very low salaries. Part-time private university tutors can earn as little as RM30 per hour for language or foundation courses. For undergraduate courses they might earn RM100 and professors might earn RM120-RM150 for graduate teaching.
Full-time PhD level lecturers in public universities can have starting salaries as low as RM3,000 per month for 40 hours per week. This is less than RM20 per hour.
Professors can start on less than RM50 per hour. A vice-chancellor can earn more in one month than a professor will earn in a year or a lecturer will earn in three.
Top professors can earn above RM20,000 per month or RM160 per hour several decades after getting their PhD.
To put this into context, for a class of 30 master’s degree students, a full-time, top professor is paid RM5 per student, per hour or about the price of a cup of coffee from a convenience store.
When a recent exposé claimed that thousands of students at top Malaysian universities were using phone apps to sell adult services we learned three things.
First students turn to escort work to pay university fees. Second, universities appear to be more concerned about the impact of this on their brand than on student welfare.
Third, with fees quoted at RM150-RM160 per hour, escorts earn more per hour than professors.
Three questions come to mind. First, how can we expect world-class higher education when professors are paid less than the cost of a cup of coffee?
Second, how do universities justify such low salaries for their faculty when they make tens of millions from PTPTN loans and vice-chancellors can earn six figures per month?
Third, are the services provided by academics in and out of the classroom really worth more than a cup of coffee or not?
In a world of free online content, artificial intelligence and universities selling certificates without the need to study, the value of what academics do may well have fallen to near zero in money terms.
Similarly, with a massive oversupply of graduates and almost 50% unemployed, underemployed or outside the labour market, the signal value of a university degree may also have fallen to near zero.
Hence the low salaries of academics may indeed accurately reflect the low value-added in the market by the university certificates they help to sell.
The “New Academia” model touted by the Higher Education Blueprint 2015-25 was never allowed space to develop, even after 10 years.
This would have changed the status of academics to be more in line with independent professionals such as lawyers, accountants, and private medical practitioners.
Academics would then be able to set up in private practice, with their own professional service firms or even become gig-workers on sharing economy platforms.
This may well be the future for academics and could help them earn more than the price of a cup of coffee per student.
Or perhaps the next Higher Education Plan 2025-2035 might suggest a “Grab-Prof” app to allow enterprising academics to make a lot more.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
