2024-09-28 18:19:27
The millionaire remuneration of the mayoral candidate opened the debate regarding the validity and competence of the work she carried out within the USS, especially in the field of academic research.
The controversy settled in the last few days for the large remuneration of Marcela Cubillos during her time as a professor at the San Sebastián University, where he received 17 million per month for his teaching work, which even caused the Prosecutor’s Office to initiate an investigation into the matter.
Given the questions received, the current candidate for mayor for Las Condes de Chile Vamos defended herself and explained that “In 2020 I started working at the USS until August of this year. “In teaching and research.”
However, Cristina Dorador, Chilean academic, doctor and scientistquestioned Cubillos’ research work, realizing that The former Minister of Education did not have publications recorded by the National Research and Development Agency (ANID), formerly Conicyt.
Dorador, a former conventional, deepened his words in an interview with radio Futuro, where he stated that “Within the university system there are certain standards, for example universities must accredit professors who do research and postgraduate teaching, and she does not meet these standards, she is not in the system.”
Along these lines, he explained the process for carrying out academic research in our country, pointing out that “first this research is evaluated by peers, often anonymous. One makes scientific or social science publications, but there is a system that guarantees that what was done is true, verifiable. The other thing is that research funds are needed and for that, we mainly apply for projects and those projects are evaluated on merit and by those who do the research.”
That is why questioned the quality of researcher of Marcela Cubillos, who only has a lawyer’s degree and has no postgraduate studies, to justify his remuneration of 17 million pesos by the San Sebastián University, since “A person with a postdoctoral degree after more or less 12 years of work in universities earns approximately $1,800,000 and you have to do a lot of work; teaching, research, connection with the environment, that is why it has been so shocking to see these huge salaries.”
Doctorates in Chile and their remunerations
The doctorate is the final degree that people can opt for in the postgraduate lineso it is common for applicants to have at least a Master’s degree and their Study time generally extends between four and five years.
Given the demands of the content to be studied, applicants must dedicate exclusive time to dealing with the curricular framework, divided into theoretical and research semesters. Its high cost means that students often seek to apply for scholarships, which are provided, for example, by ANID itself.
Regarding the remunerations that can be achieved in the academic world in our country, from the Consortium of Universities of the State of Chile (Cuech) They indicated to The Clinic that the average is between 3 to 5 million pesos per month.
Osvaldo Corrales, rector of the University of Valparaíso and president of Cuech, maintained that “probably, the The salary of a full-time professor, with a doctorate degree, with exclusive dedication, ranges between 3 million or 3 and a half million, and 5 million pesos. But as a gross salary.”
Nevertheless, there are exceptional cases where the remunerations exceed these amounts, but far from the $17 million received by Marcela Cubillos at the San Sebastián University.
Such is the case of Eduardo Engel, economist and mathematical civil engineer with a PhD from Stanford and another from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who teaches full-time classes at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Chile, in addition to other projects at the university.
Engel has 21 indexed publications -focused on macroeconomics, public finances, infrastructure economics and public finances-, the last two this year, He was a tenured professor at Yale University for more than a decade and co-author of the book The Economics of Public-Private Partnerships: A Basic Guidepublished by the University of Cambridge, translated into Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. His remuneration is $9,819,715 gross.
He is followed by his counterpart at the University of Chile and former president of the board of directors of Codelco, Oscar Landerretche, commercial engineer with a major in Economics and a Ph.D in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has four indexed publications on the subject.
Landerretche also has experience with the Central Bank, the Financial Advisory Council of the Ministry of Finance and with previous experience at the same university as a teacher. His salary as of June is $9,402,049 gross.