Faculty members at Beijing University and Qinghua University will get a maximum income of 70, 000 yuan annually, including a yearly allowance of 50,000 yuan, according to a new policy of the Ministry of Education (MOE).

Sources at the ministry said the government will allocate 1.8 billion yuan to each of the two universities in the next three years, provided that a large portion of the money is used to increase teachers' income.

According to the plan of the two universities, all faculty members, divided into nine categories, will get monthly allowances ranging from 300 yuan to 5,000 yuan per month or more.

Chi Huisheng, vice president of Beijing University, said that his school set aside 300 million yuan out of the total 1.8 billion yuan to improve the livelihood of the teaching staff.

Not all faculty get the same allowance, however, and their pay raises will be mainly achievement-based. Outstanding young teachers and leading researchers are most likely to get handsome salary hikes.

College professors in China have lived in a low-income range for years. Some said that although most teachers in Beijing expected their income to reach 3,500 yuan per month, their actual monthly pay is no more than 1,300 yuan.

Pei Zhaohong, director of administration of human resources at Qinghua University, said that the teachers cannot live a well-off life and get looked down on by some other people because of their low income.

"So it is not surprising that they will leave the colleges," Pei added.

According to a survey conducted by a Beijing-based company, 30 percent of college teachers have thought of leaving their current jobs, with the rate as high as 40 percent among the teachers under 45.

Low pay has forced increasingly more teachers to leave academia for jobs in commercial companies or even to go abroad.

Along with Beijing and Qinghua universities, Shanghai-based Fudan University and Shanghai Jiaotong University will get 1.2 billion yuan each in the next three years from MOE and the municipal government of Shanghai.

MOE has pledged that the actual income of college teachers and their housing should reach the above-average level in the country by 2005. (Xinhua)