It is said that: “In a time of famine you don’t eat your seeds.”
As a sector and a country we are dangerously close to doing just that and making a grab for the Education Sector as somewhere to severely cut back during a recession.
Someone needs to be standing at the door of the potting shed with a pickaxe handle ready to make people see sense.
Ideally the powers that be in the third level sector should have a little sit down and weigh up the pros and cons of protecting the students’ interests and come to the conclusion that more and better educated seeds will make for a richer harvest in a couple of years. End of metaphor.
However the pressures that are on the universities and ITs are manifold and they push the institutions away from a student-centric outlook on where they spend money.
It’s extremely easy to moan and bitch about the underfunding of third-level courses and the decline in quality of teaching, but you have to bear in mind that the funding of the sector forces institutions into this behaviour.
Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have a few sources of funding:
The Higher Education Authority (HEA) gives colleges a bit of cash for things like capital projects, teaching etc. This lump some; or core grant; includes the fees that the government pays on your behalf if you’re ‘traditional’ enough as the HEA calls it.
Another thing colleges rely on is research grants provided by numerous awarding bodies and quangos. These grants tend to be inadequate, so the administration of research projects can siphon off a fair bit from the core grant which should be used for teaching.
Fees paid by people who don’t get them from Uncle Paddy are very important to college and remember as well that, every student pays €1500 too for their ‘free’ education. And then there’s philanthropy and fundraising and all of the other kinds of begging, borrowing, stealing and selling-out that HEIs do to avoid budget deficit and surplus.
The way the core grant is allocated to the colleges rewards Trinity for increasing class sizes and increase the student:teacher ratio. Since all universities are forced to compete for a fixed pot of money this means that more students equals less money per student, but more money for college.
This forces Trinity to diversify its revenue streams and to look for more postgrad fees, international students and research grants to fund the basic activities of teaching and research.
The cost of running a good system with a high student:teacher ratio is much greater than one with a smaller ratio for the same number of students. So for the same money, contact time and student engagement suffer because of large class sizes.
In plain English, the funding model used by the government causes Trinity to struggle to pay for high quality teaching and high quality research – resulting in a tug of war.
Students have benifitted in some ways from the recession. For example chicken fillet rolls are cheaper and we also now have the opportunity to fix the funding of the education system. Political parties are moving inexorably towards the question of how the third level is funded and if fees or loans or taxes or anything would fix any of it. This weekend the Greens are supposedly looking at it as part of their revised programme for government talks.
A legislative investment at the very least is needed in the HE sector in Ireland. If the guys with the pickaxe handles (see earlier metaphor) get pushed aside and the current or following governments cut deep enough into the sector financially, then we may as well buckle down and enjoy cheap chicken fillets for quite some time.
We all know that Ireland relies on tax incentives and the jargon of being a ‘knowledge economy’ to attract foreign investment and punch well above our weight economically. We also know that the Irish are tripping over themselves to get into or back into tertiary education.
Why then don’t the policy-makers follow suit and try to sort out the 3rd level so that it can cope with the demands being placed on it and give the nation a return on that investment?
Considering the lack of money and other resources that Irish colleges have to work with compared to say America or Finland; they do surprisingly well. You could even call them lean. Just think if HEIs were funded based on ideals of quality teaching and cutting edge research then Finland could just move aside as the EU’s greatest knowledge economy and we could actually drag ourselves into the recovery that we seem to assume is just going to happen.
