In 1972, the Egyptian pound was equivalent to $2.3, and a gram of 21-carat gold did not exceed 170 piasters. In that year, Law No. 49 on the Organisation of Universities was issued, carrying the salary scale for faculty members; in it, salaries for the rank of “professor” ranged between EGP 1,400 and EGP 1,800 a year, to which were added EGP 420 as a university allowance and EGP 75 as an annual periodic increment. Divided out, the average monthly salary for the highest university rank was EGP 174.5, equivalent to $405.8, without accounting for inflation-adjusted purchasing power, or 102.6 grams of 21-carat gold.
Today, more than 50 years later, a university professor’s salary at the end of his service ranges between EGP 15,000 and EGP 17,000, that is, $300 to $340, or 2.5 to 2.9 grams of gold. The salary that was once equivalent to more than a hundred grams of gold no longer reaches three grams, and the law that was issued when the pound was worth two dollars is still applied in some of its provisions to this day.
Dr Wael Kamel, a professor at the Faculty of Music Education at Capital University, tells Zawia3: “We are still receiving our salaries counted in pounds and piasters, after a long journey of work, research and obtaining prestigious academic degrees. The result is a faculty member turning in a mill to bring in money, students who do not receive their full right to education, and scientific research in which quantity has prevailed over quality, and in the end society has lost.”
This debate, whose echoes are growing in academic circles, has reached the House of Representatives, while the law that established those salaries is still applied in some of its provisions more than half a century later. During the intervening fifty years, the salary scale underwent a single amendment in 1983 and another in 2012 that was limited to raising the university allowance only. Then came the 2015 general budget appropriation decision, which fixed incentives, allowances and bonuses as amounts drawn from the basic salary of 2015 specifically, not as a percentage of the basic salary that changes every year, while deductions are calculated according to the current year’s salary. This led to a continuous erosion of wages as the years passed and inflation accumulated, arriving at the figures in circulation today.
The Wage Crisis and the Future of the Knowledge Economy
In a study titled “The Academic Wage Crisis and the Future of the Knowledge Economy in Egypt”, Dr Tarek Kapiel, a biotechnology expert and adviser for science journalism and communication at the Faculty of Science, Cairo University, documents the accumulated pressures that faculty members endure: the rising cost of living, the increasing costs of scientific research, international publication fees, the costs of scientific conferences, and regional and global competition for talent, all of this in the face of a basic salary that represents only a tiny fraction of total pay, while bonuses and incentives, foremost among them the quality incentive, and the university allowance make up the bulk of it.
The study affirms that the university professor is the cornerstone of development, as he is entrusted with preparing human capital, producing knowledge and scientific research, transferring technology, supporting the knowledge-based economy, and improving universities’ international rankings. However, the current state of salaries leads to documented repercussions: a widening gap between scientific research and industry, dwindling opportunities for the transition to a knowledge economy, lower rates of innovation, the declining competitiveness of universities, the reduced attractiveness of the academic track, and the emigration of minds and talent.
The study cites international experiences in this area: the United States linked performance, funding and scientific research and put in place a flexible contract system based on productivity and excellence; Germany achieved job stability for faculty members along with strong research support and a comprehensive evaluation system; Singapore made huge investments to attract scientists and offered globally competitive salaries; and China saw large increases in research spending while linking universities to industry and innovation.
The number of faculty members and teaching assistants at public universities and Al-Azhar stands at 123,500 members as of 2024/2025, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS). Dr Wael Kamel divides this community into two equal halves: about 50% from medical and engineering specialisations, who may have opportunities for independent work outside the university, and 50% from the humanities and other specialisations, whose income is limited to the university salary and who rarely find work outside. In all cases, Articles 100 to 103 of the Universities Organisation Law restrict work outside the university’s walls, and prohibit private tutoring, setting up companies and engaging in trade except with exceptional permission from the university president according to specific regulations.
Kamel points out that some salary items are still measured in piasters to this day: the annual periodic increment for the rank of assistant professor is EGP 72, and for the rank of professor EGP 75, a difference of EGP 3, that is, 25 piasters a month when divided by twelve, and this is what an assistant professor reaps after gruelling promotion research. As for the difference in total salary between the two ranks, it amounts to about EGP 2,000.
Kamel notes that the 2012 amendment of the university allowance was supposed to be the beginning of further stages of reform, but that did not happen. Because faculty members are subject to a special cadre rather than the Civil Service Law, their basic salary represents only 20% of the total they receive, while variables such as incentives and allowances make up the remaining share, all of which are calculated on the basis of the 2015 basic salary, not on the salary that changes every year. And while the basic salary rises under the cadre system by 10 or 15% a year, the actual amount of this increase remains meagre relative to the already low value of the basic salary.
Dr Mohamed Ishaq, former dean of the Faculty of Art Education at Capital University, believes that the dependence of 80% of the salary on variable items, some of them paid by the Ministry of Finance and others the responsibility of the university, leaves the faculty member unable to know his salary precisely or to control it. He tells Zawia3 that this reality has produced a pattern of scrambling for crumbs of money: “The faculty member has become entirely preoccupied with the financial matter, so he seeks by any means to supervise a thesis regardless of its academic level, or to sit on a committee, even a purely formal one, for the sake of the allowance he receives for this work, which is a handful of pounds, and this is unbefitting of a faculty member and of the role entrusted to him.”
Solving Problems with Problems
Dr Wael Kamel believes that the government confronted low salaries with a solution that led to a bigger problem: it introduced the quality incentive, which grew year after year until it departed from its administrative and financial nature and came to make up more than a quarter of faculty members’ income, so that they cannot do without it, while it has turned into a burden on the state budget. When its increase was ignored last year, it took parliamentary appeals and pressure from faculty members before EGP 1.5 billion was allocated for it this year, amid a continuing search for mechanisms to rein in the inflation the incentive has reached. The House of Representatives’ Plan and Budget Committee has approved supporting the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research with this amount to pay the quality incentive to faculty members and their assistants at universities, institutes and research centres in the 2026/2027 budget.
The pensions problem is no different in its logic, as pensions are calculated on the basic wage alone, so a member’s pension does not exceed EGP 4,000 to 5,000 at the very most. The government’s solution here, too, was to allow professional careers to continue past the age of sixty, so that the professor combines pension and salary. The result is that faculty members keep working even when diseases of old age such as Alzheimer’s hamper them, which has inflated their numbers and placed an additional burden on the budget. While some faculties are lenient with older members, settling for their attendance one or two days a week, other faculties deduct their incentives and allowances in full if they are absent. Kamel asks: “How does a university professor with financial and social obligations live on only EGP 4,000?”
Promotion at the Egyptian university is a costly path before it is an academic one. Every step towards it requires money, in addition to the fact that its requirements were built on the criterion of quantity rather than quality, in implementation of the recommendations of international university rankings, rankings that Kamel describes as illusory and from which more than one global university has withdrawn.
The guide to the rules of the 15th session of the Supreme Council of Universities for 2025 requires a faculty member to submit between 3 and 8 published or publishable research papers to obtain promotion, along with a statement of training courses, with a minimum of 3 courses that the faculty approved attending, signed by the dean. And these courses are not free.
The cost of publication alone makes for a heavy bill: the price of a single page in the faculty journal is EGP 30, an average of EGP 2,000 per paper, which multiplies with the publication of 7 or 8 papers. International publication is paid in dollars. There is no budget allocated for research at the state level, and what faculties provide may be non-existent.
Kamel says that a faculty member has three tasks: teaching and graduating generations, serving the community, and scientific research. But the promotion system evaluates nothing but research, so the other two tasks recede. The result is students who hate their subjects because the teacher is not held accountable for the quality of his teaching, and a professor unable to serve his community because he cannot even meet the needs of his family in the first place. Kamel believes that a single research paper that solves a real problem is more deserving of a promotion than seven papers lined up on library shelves, but the dominance of quantity has created research factories in which good work gets lost in the crowd.
Kamel compares this reality with some universities in Europe that separate teaching from research, appointing some members whose sole task is teaching, and others who devote themselves to scientific research in cooperation with the labour market to produce research that addresses real problems. He stresses that the true role of the university is to adopt the outstanding student appointed as a teaching assistant and support him until his expertise bears fruit in the future, but the situation in Egypt has been turned on its head, and teaching has become a burden on employees.
There is a widespread belief that faculty members earn additional income from the university textbook that makes up for their low salaries. Dr Wael Kamel corrects this picture: the university textbook is not, in origin, a natural academic phenomenon, but was born out of the salary crisis. The norm in university education is for the professor to refer his students to multiple sources in which they do their own research, but low salaries pushed faculty members to write books that they sell to their students and benefit from their financial return according to the number of students enrolled with them, so that whoever teaches a crowded specialisation earns far more than whoever teaches a specialisation whose students do not exceed a few dozen.
Over time, universities laid their hands on this resource: the book came to be sold through them in exchange for a percentage for the professor and higher percentages going to the leadership, and it was later turned into an electronic format. Kamel gives an example from his personal experience: he took part in preparing a university textbook from which he received only EGP 1,200 for the entire semester, because of the limited number of his students.
Briefing Requests in the House of Representatives
Last June, coinciding with the approval of the state’s new general budget, three members of the House of Representatives submitted briefing requests to examine the crisis of faculty members’ salaries. MP Heidi El-Maghazy submitted a request for a briefing addressed to the ministers of higher education and finance on the extent to which the structure of wages and allowances applied to faculty members and teaching assistants at public universities is consistent with the state’s targets for developing higher education and scientific research.
The MP called on the government to clarify why it continues to work with financial tables that rest, in some of their components, on historical amendments made decades ago, and the extent to which this affects the retention of academic and research talent and the quality of the educational process, especially given the state’s attention to the higher education and scientific research sector as one of the main pillars for building an economy based on knowledge and innovation.
MP Mostafa Bakry also submitted a request for a briefing addressed to the prime minister and the ministers of higher education and finance, stressing that faculty members’ salaries are not commensurate with the scale of the responsibilities placed on their shoulders in teaching, scientific research and community service.
Via his account on the X platform, Bakry said he had learned that Dr Mostafa Madbouly, the prime minister, had formed a committee headed by Counsellor Sherif El-Shazly, head of the Authority of Cabinet Advisers, to study the legal position with the aim of improving the salaries of teaching staff at Egyptian universities in light of how low they are, as a teaching assistant receives only about EGP 8,000, a faculty dean EGP 15,000 and a university president EGP 17,000, and that the prime minister would consider the matter in light of the report submitted.
For his part, a faculty member, who asked not to be named, tells Zawia3, commenting on the salaries that MP Mostafa Bakry mentioned for deans and university presidents, that the situation for them differs from that of faculty members because of bonuses: a university president’s salary, for example, may reach EGP 1 million thanks to bonuses, and the bonus for international students alone is 18 times the monthly income of the university president and the dean, and may exceed the EGP 300,000 mark in a single semester, whereas a faculty member receives only EGP 1,200 per semester, and there are many other resources such as private programmes, the university textbook and others, which points to injustice in the distribution of resources.
He points out that one reason the crisis of faculty members’ salaries has not been resolved is that the leaders who speak in their name are people with large incomes who do not face the same hardship, and some of them have no interest in raising the crisis in the first place.
Dr Hisham El-Badry, professor and head of the Public Law Department at Menoufia University, put out a book titled “Special Funds and Accounts”, in which he presented an applied study of two university funds, the Educational Activities Fund and the University Hospitals Fund, pointing to an imbalance in the distribution of these funds’ revenues in favour of university leaders, to the point that the income of the president of the weakest university, his deputies and the deans exceeds several million a month.
No official statement has been issued by the Cabinet so far on the formation of the committee, or on the taking of measures to improve faculty members’ salaries, apart from Bakry’s statement.
MP Soraya El-Badawy also submitted a request for a briefing in which she said that the low salaries of faculty members have direct effects on the quality of university education, the stability of the academic process, the future of scientific research and the ability to retain national talent within Egyptian universities, pointing out that the required remedy calls for an explicit legislative text in the Universities Organisation Law referring to a clear and updated financial regulation.
She explained that the full-time academic commitment required by Article 100 of the Universities Organisation Law, for the tasks of teaching, academic advising, community service and scientific research, cannot remain a one-sided legal obligation, but must be matched by a fair financial arrangement that preserves stability and dignity.
Difficult Conditions Turn Out Academically Weak Generations
Dr Mohamed Ishaq stresses that faculty members excelled in order to become scientists and thinkers in the service of society, not employees who do not know their own salaries because variable items dominate them. During his tenure as dean of the Faculty of Art Education, he says, he witnessed tragedies unbefitting an academic institution: “I witnessed a young man who did not want to go home until after his children were asleep, because they had asked him for things he could not provide, and others who went off to mark exams when the cost of transport was more than the fee for the marking, and a third, one of the senior professors, who was on the verge of death and still had to go to the faculty so that his incentives and allowances would not be deducted. So what kind of human situation are faculty members living in? What dignity is society talking about for the university professor, and what letdown does he face when confronting his family’s needs?”
Dr Wael Kamel adds that some faculty members, despite the law restricting work outside the university’s walls, are forced to take on extra jobs, some of them unbefitting a faculty member. At the same time, there are professors whose only tie to the university is its title: they work outside it and use their affiliation with it only to introduce themselves in other fields. Kamel believes that this imbalance, together with the absence of academic advising, real research and community service, has produced academically weak generations; and what is said about the declining importance of some specialisations is, at its core, due to low salaries, the promotion systems and professors’ inability to fulfil their duty towards their students.
Demands and Solutions
Dr Mohamed Ishaq rejects the idea of treatment with painkillers: a faculty member is not a hired hand to be satisfied with variable allowances and incentives. What is needed is a fixed salary of no less than EGP 50,000 a month, which in his estimate is an average that suffices to secure food, clothing, education and medical care for the professor’s family, not luxuries. With news spreading of the formation of a government committee to examine the demands, Ishaq calls for faculty members’ representatives on it to be elected from each university, not nominated by university presidents, expressing surprise at the indifference shown by many university leaders who themselves lived through the details of this hardship before reaching positions for which they receive far higher bonuses and allowances. He calls for setting a minimum and a maximum for bonuses and for fairness in their distribution.
Dr Wael Kamel calls for a fair redistribution of university resources, citing the fact that universities have announced surpluses in the billions without this being reflected in faculty members’ salaries. To address the pensions crisis specifically, he proposes setting up a fund along the lines of what other groups subject to special cadres have done, its resources to be a set percentage of student fees, the university textbook, revenues from international students and private programmes, and to be applied to all Egyptian universities, whether public, private, national or international. The fund’s task would be to provide 80% of the university professor’s last salary, sparing the sick and the incapacitated from having to go out to work, and at the same time saving the state budget the bonuses and allowances currently being paid.
For his part, Dr Tarek Kapiel sets out in his study a strategic vision for reform based on: raising the basic component of income so that it becomes competitive and sustainable; restructuring wages according to a clear, fair and transparent structure based on performance and competence; linking incentives to scientific output and innovation; supporting young researchers through funding programmes and grants at the start of their careers; providing competitive funding for research projects according to clear criteria; strengthening partnership with industry through joint projects, technology transfer and the marketing of innovations; encouraging university start-ups and business incubators; and supporting international publication in prestigious scientific journals, financially and technically. The study concludes that investing in the academic is an investment in the nation’s future: an outstanding university professor means strong scientific research, innovation, a sustainable knowledge economy and comprehensive development.
