College fee hikes back on table in funds row
“The spectre of higher college fees is looming again as universities prepare to put pressure on the Government to tackle the issue of who will foot the growing bill for third-level education …” (more)
[Katherine Donnelly, Independent, 10 February]
Tags: fees, IUA, Patrick Prendergast, Ruairí Quinn, student contribution charge, university funding
The universities need to think about their unilateral options to raise fees or reduce student numbers to force this issue along, otherwise the temptation will be for report after report but no actual action. UCD and TCD in particular need to more or less double their number of academic staff, holding student numbers constant.
This issue never left the table for the universities, but it’s not on the governments agenda at all. The universities bill is about cost containment in the sector as they have not explored in any meaningful way efficiencies. The sector probably need more resources, but until it sorts out its own stable the government is unlikely to fund new horses.
Tim — could you perhaps explain more? the outputs at TCD and I believe UCD are extraordinarily high given their tiny inputs, including very small numbers of staff compared to e.g. UK universities of similar student numbers. What sort of efficiencies are you thinking of?
I know where you are coming from and you are right- systemically the Irish HEI sector is thrifty compared to other OECD countries, but there is a huge variance between the cost/outputs across the entire system (take a look at the recent hea document “towards a performance evaluation”), and the perception is that this is also afoot inside each university. The real question is not TCD and UCD- it is the poor returns on investment that some of the other universities offer.
So, reading the tea leaves…. I think the government/hea want to see the system reform (or at least show an appetite for reform) before introducing fresh funds. The policy concern is that the fresh funds would get mopped up in overhead rather than service (be that research, teaching or engagement). The perception (rightly or wrongly) is that administrative overhead is running out of control (all the new layers of management and admin), there is nothing gamechanging being done to turn around underperforming faculty and departments, capital plans lack value for money and senior managers are not leading in cost containment around them.
Look at the university bill and the TU bill in development- they show the policy ambitions by the government/hea; and they both scream no new money, reform and greater government/hea control.
I’ll read that document, thanks. The system at UCD / TCD is already mostly remarkably good given current limited funds, and pre-1990s legacy issues, although some departments are weaker than others. I hope we can move beyond “rightly or wrongly” since there are almost no administrators at the Irish university I know best, just as academic numbers are very small too. And some of the other issues are just genuinely hard to address: turning around academic departments is usually done with new hires, for example, and that is also very difficult in the current environment. So I can understand misplaced-perceptions-about-inefficiencies-may-prevent-new resources-for-Irish-universities, but I can’t understand Irish-universities-must-sort-out-their-own-stable-before-deserving-any-new-resources, at least as it applies to UCD and TCD.
“they both scream no new money, reform and greater government/hea control”
Well, we’ll have to see what we get. But universities tend to flourish with less, rather than more, government control.
Its pretty hard to expect much more performance from Irish universities. They are doing pretty darn well all things considered.