Department models and individual academics.

In an earlier incarnation of my working life, I was a member of an organisation called the heads of chemistry UK. While chatting with a colleague at a meeting, he described a model for running an academic department that could be called a 2 to 1 model.

Essentially the way this works is that the income from an academic department is split in half. One half goes to the University and the other half goes to the department. With their half, the university does what it does: supply estate, power and lights, deans, pro vice chancellors, vice chancellors, marketing, human resources, admin, and so forth. The other half pays academic staff salaries, consumables, and supplies.This model is sometimes called a contribution model, where a key performance indicator or KPI is a contribution of a particular percentage of income to the University.

This isn't far from many corporate models. I think business gets interested when a widget can be sold at roughly 2 times cost.

At the time, there was a report which essentially showed most chemistry and physics programmes in the UK were operating in deficit mostly due to research related issues ( topic for another time). If you are curious a copy of the report may be found here. That is the macro picture.

Let's look at this from the point of view of an individual staff member. Income from teaching comes from students in return for credit points (cp). In the UK, a student might take 120 credit points in a year. In a non-clinical science, those 120 credit points (cp) might cost  £10,483. A chemistry sub-discipline consisting of perhaps 3 staff might teach the equivalent of three 20 cp modules (classes for US readers) to 100 students in each. This works out to be roughly £500,000 of income or about £166,000 per academic. This is a reasonably conservative estimate as some academics will have grant income or be part of a successful RAE/REF submission.

What about salaries? For the rank and file (Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, Principal Lecturer, and Reader) in the NEW university sector, salaries are covered by a national framework. You can find a slightly outdated version here. (since then the top of the scale has risen to around £55,000).

What does this tell you? A typical teaching oriented academic is a reasonably productive worker, many will be delivering in excess of ~3x salary in "product." Yes, there are additional support requirements: estates, deans, marketing, admin, IT, but we don't do badly and many of us teach to larger cohorts of students than indicated here.

To figure your "productivity" find out the cost (sometimes quite different from advertised price to a student) per credit point (or related local measure of university "widget") multiply that by the credit points per module and then by the total number of students in the module. If team taught, divide the cash amount by the number of staff. Please use this number responsibly, it is an index and others are involved in the overall enterprise.