From his office overlooking a noisy front square, the Vice-Provost paints a bleak picture of the funding situation facing the college. The government block grant, the largest single source of funding, has fallen from over €100m to €65m since 2008. The financial crisis has reduced the income from the college’s investments while philanthropic donations have fallen.
Patrick Prendergast, the Vice-Provost/Chief Academic Officer holds responsibilities spanning across the college and is frequently touted as a candidate in the forthcoming Provostorial election. As chair of the powerful Planning Group, Prendergast oversees implementation of the Strategic Plan and the funding issues facing the College.
“What we want to do above all is maintain the quality of undergraduate and postgraduate education, and that requires money. Even in the downturn over the last two years, I feel we’ve done as best we can to maintain the quality and maintain provision of student services. And that’s been done by individuals really stretching themselves, academic and administrative staff stretching current resources to perhaps breaking point … and there’s not much further we can go here”. Prendergast’s big fear is that the December budget with its drive for austerity will lead to a further cut in the core grant. As he sees it, that would be catastrophic for the college, going “beyond breaking point, to the situation where quality of education provision is going to suffer. Fewer lecturers, fewer labs, this is what we’re facing.”
Trinity is required to balance its budget under the Universities Act, and yet is subject to government demands to reduce staff numbers and slash costs at the same time as increasing student numbers and supporting “innovation”. When the Provost wrote to the Higher Education Authority (HEA) earlier this year to warn that the college was expecting to run a deficit for the academic year 2009-10, the HEA responded bluntly that this was not acceptable. While the college may have managed to close the gap last year, it is projecting a significant deficit for each of the years to 2015.
Prendergast says that “Faculty Deans and the Chief Operating Officer have been tasked by the Planning Group to cut 5% in expenditure” for this current year, but insists that “reducing expenditure is going to have to go alongside increasing income, and diversifying income away from Exchequer sources”. He sees the introduction of tuition fees in some form as likely in the coming years given the pressure on the public finances, and supports schemes whereby students “wouldn’t have to pay at the point of entry”. The publication last week of the Browne Review on Higher Education in the UK has put pressure on the Irish Department of Education to publish its own review authored by economist Colin Hunt, and could reignite the issue of student fees in Ireland.
Presently tuition fees are paid by the government for all Irish and EU students, bringing in about €43m in revenue for Trinity every year on top of state grants, research funding and other operational income. Any moves to introduce a student contribution would see students instead of government paying the tuition fee, perhaps with the student registration fee added on. This means that for Trinity to see a real increase in funding, the government would have to use savings made to increase the block grant – an unlikely proposition while it is searching for €4bn in savings this year alone – or raise tuition fees by a substantial amount. Prendergast acknowledges the potential for Irish students to look abroad if either the quality of higher education at home is judged to be falling, or fee levels make foreign universities attractive.
Regardless of the introduction of any form of student contribution, universities will still be largely dependent on the government for funding, through the block grant and research grants from the state and semi-state bodies. Irish spending on tertiary education declined as a share of both public spending and education spending during the boom years, and to a large extent this is the cause of the funding difficulties facing universities across Ireland. The failure of the higher education sector to convince successive governments and voters of its importance is a theme Prendergast takes up. “Universities have to make a strong case, and they have to make the case to Irish society in general, that the provision of high quality higher education is of benefit to all” he says, pointing out a role for Students’ Unions in this task.
It is clear that Prendergast places a high value on the quality of education for both undergraduates and post-graduate students. Concern for maintaining the quality of a Trinity education underlies his belief in the need for a student contribution, rather than an ideological desire to see autonomous universities independent of government control. Later in our conversation, he insists that “senior staff right up to the senior lecturers should be engaging with undergraduates” in both junior and senior freshmen years.
With the financial position of the college under such strain, it remains to be seen if student services like the medical centre or clubs and societies funded from the registration fee will escape cutbacks. The quality of both undergraduate and graduate degrees will come under increasing pressure as ever more cuts are demanded. The funding of higher education is a complex issue that doesn’t get much discussion in public. The gains to universities of a student loan scheme rests on the willingness of the government to reinvest any savings to the exchequer in higher education.
Whoever is victorious in this year’s Provostorial election faces a huge task in managing the funding challenge, and the issue will be foremost on the campaign trail.
