PITY the poor academic. These pedagogues may not have the most glamorous image, but at least there is always the pension.

At least there always was the pension. This week Universities UK, an education action group, has reported that the sector’s final-salary pension scheme must change – a move that can only make the profession less attractive in future.

The report has two unpalatable solutions to reducing costs of the highly regarded scheme.

Option one is to base the scheme on average earnings, rather than on final salaries. Alternatively, academics could be asked to make higher monthly contributions.

Either way, the pill won’t be an easy one to swallow. Robin Clark, a senior lecturer at Aston University in Birmingham, told The Times Higher Education Supplement (Oct 19) that ending the final-salary schemes would make careers in higher education less attractive. The pension was a big factor in his decision to leave industry and enter the profession: “One of the reasons I looked at higher education was that I was at the stage in my life when I was looking for security.”

Gillian Howie, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Liverpool, agrees with Clark. She says that the pension “is definitely an incentive for public sector workers and it helps to make up for salaries that only just keep up with inflation. It is definitely a very good pension scheme and it would be terrible to lose. If that happened, staff would feel undermined.”

An earlier poll of 87 universities found that most want employees to share the burden of future higher pensions costs.

Bill Wakeham, chair of the Employers’ Pensions Forum, tells THES that the higher education sector is not immune from forces that have led the Government to seek pensions reform.

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