Which actually made me wonder - where/how do London academics live? I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs - it does not seem very consistent with an academic life - but I do not see them being able to afford to live near their universities either.
At Imperial: They mostly commute (but not for hours), because it's basically impossible to find a decent flat in South Kensington. It works, because Imperial has matching childcare. Also, many mathematicians tend to work from home frequently.
Imperial, on the whole, is one of the better-paying Universities in the UK, and certain Departments are able to provide considerable supplements upon base salaries.
The vast majority of academics with families live in the outer zones in London, or commute by rail from the suburbs just outside. London has a very dense and efficient public transport network, and therefore a typical commute time is around 40 minutes, and in most cases less than 1hr.
The price of accomodation remains an issue with younger academics, who arrived in London after the housing booms (1st surge around 2004, 2nd around 2010). Consultancy, enterpreneurship etc do provide good additional income streams for many, and therefore it still all makes sense.
More recently Imperial has been developing some of its own accomodation for junior staff and graduate students, which is made available at subsidised rates.
> I find it hard to imagine them commuting for hours from the suburbs...
Why? It's as easy to commute from certain places outside of London as inside. For instance, it takes longer for me to get from where I live in south London to e.g. Kings Cross than it would to get there from Cambridge. The amount of time you save by living more centrally is probably less than 20 minutes.
Ha I agree with the broad point, but as someone who (used to until Covid) commute from South London to Kings Cross everyday, this doesn't seem true timewise until you live quite far South in London. And I live a 15 minute walk from a tube station.
Tooting -> Kings X is 49 minutes according to citymapper. Cambridge -> Kings X is a 48 minute train. I personally wouldn't consider Tooting to be deep south, but maybe we have different definitions. I have a friend who lives near Kingston, it's roughly an hour commute for him.
I don't know how City Mapper is getting that number to be honest. TFL gives 35 minutes, and that includes 5 minutes for walking out the tube at Kings Cross.
The trick is you have to change at Stockwell onto the Victoria Line.
Nb. I did almost this journey every day pre-lockdown and the numbers are accurate for me at least.
The same way that everyone else does; buying a 1.5M 2 bed flat in Zone 1 isn’t possible on UK tech salaries either, even if you reach the top tiers for UK tech pay which usually tops at around £125K base you aren’t buying central London properties either.
But then who is buying them? I see plenty of young families that seemingly live in those 1.5M zone 1-2 houses and flats, and many do not appear to be renting (although maybe they are? But not like renting is THAT much cheaper either).
> I imagine that a knighted professor at Imperial can comfortably access a mortgage in London
You don't get paid for being knighted. And these universities have a mostly fixed pay scale it's not like Google where you can just demand whatever you want if you're good enough.
Well, there does exist a fixed pay scale for base salaries, but for senior academic grades in many occasions this simply defines the minimum salary, and the rest is negotiable (particularly if the academic has a good record of obtaining research grants).
Then again, there exist Business Schools, where due to the different funding model (most income comes from MBAs, as opposed to research grant overheads, and undergraduate tuition fees), full professors can easily make near-£200k in base salary.
Even with a salary of 200k per year, it's unlikely they will be able to afford a 2 or 3 bedroom flat in South Kensington. According to Zoopla/Foxtons, the average price is around 2M.
Looking more closely on glassdoor: it's unlikely to be true that Imperial professor salaries average £80k and University College London salaries average £101k, and these figures are more likely biased by small, self-selecting samples.
[Updated to note: Imperial College quotes a fixed minimum salary of £79,080 for professors in 2019 with performance-related increases - so the Glassdoor figures quoting lower than that cannot be right]
The home.co.uk site quotes the median price of property listings is £600k (is that close to £1m? ok sure). It also identifies that houses priced higher than that are listed for significantly longer, i.e. they count with more weight in this stat despite not selling. Therefore, I understand the median sale price to be lower.
Is London compatible with your idea of an academic life?
A friend rejected a job at Imperial because he didn't want to live in a metropolis. Another friend stays at UCL because she can't bear to leave London.
FYI: How Stanford University handles that now is that they have a new subdivision on campus, and chosen professors are given title to a nice house. When they move later, they are given the assessed profit of any rise in house value over the years.
This was necessary because house prices in Palo Alto are in the $2+ million range, which is not affordable to profs, and prevents them from the normal housing ladder investment seen in the rest of the USA.
A lot of the profs use bicycles to ride the mile or so to class.
it's kinda scary that the go-to personal investment plan is based on a leveraged buy & sell with the implied promise that things perpetually increase in value.
