Higher education and research

Richard,

You said it all — “few patients” – – but too much patience!

It’s all good propaganda via the paper of record.

The loss of almost 600 jobs is a tragedy as is the loss of 6 that gets no media attention.

Converting institutes into technology universities maybe good politics but a technology university such as ETH Zurich, has no need to worry.

As for SFI, what is the metric of success for this grant-giving quango?

According to Director-General of SFI, John Travers, “SFI’s focus continues to be the establishment of Ireland as a location renowned for the excellence of scientific research. The challenging economic environment which has continued through 2010 and into 2011 has deterred neither industry nor the researchers that SFI funds in order to support the further development of the knowledge economy, in their combined quest of achieving research excellence and realising commercial potential.

In tandem with this alliance of highly-skilled individuals and groups, SFI continues to working closely with Government to help deliver innovation, efficiencies and value for money on a sustained basis.”

No realistic assessment of outcomes whatsoever.

My understanding is that many of the research oriented countries became that because they had successful industries making a developing products. It seems that in Ireland the ‘developing’ angle is pretty underdeveloped (terrible turn of phrase) relative to the research emphasis. But to be fair when academic salaries are so high for professors etc. the incentive to take risks and put the house on the line evaporates. The taxpayer is picking up all the downside for R&D commercialization in Ireland. The upside goes to the VCs and the researchers mainly, with EI getting its bit of the pie as well. Small bespoke tech firms are reminiscent of the economy pictured in Bladerunner – one ‘shop’ does genetically engineered eyes, another skins, etc. Also patents measure very little if they are taken out to protect a core product or process.

Rank 20 for citations but 4 early-stage spin-outs in 2010.

The question is not whether there should be funding or not for science but surely annual public spending of €2.5bn should be more than another welfare programme?

What is the alternative to a spin-out with potential being sold-out by the promoters and VC investors to an American firm before the taxpayer gets any payback for the overall investment in the sector.

The number of ‘collaborations,’ is touted but the taxpayer could be providing 75% of the funding.

After decades of public support for enterprises, we don’t have a clue as to the survival record of firms nor do we have data from longitudinal studies of firms that are successful.

Enterprise policy continues to be dominated by spin with dazzled ministers being unable to separate fact from fiction.

Ireland has the 8th highest number of universities per capita in the world already.

Actually, the graph says that it has the 8th highest number of universities ranked in the top 500 worldwide per capita. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

International rankings are not normalized for size; small universities cannot do well.

Don’t the rankings that you linked to try to do precisely that (at least in terms of the size of the countries), and don’t the results somewhat undermine (or at least place in doubt) the second part of your statement?

There is little patenting by Irish organisations and Irish inventors.

Good. Patents have become a con game and protection racket, and an impediment to innovation and insustry. Ireland and Irish universities should stay as far way from that debacle as possible.

@Richard Tol

Let’s look at the relevant paragraph from your post:

Furthermore, Ireland has plenty of universities already. The largest university has 18,000 students (UCD, 2009) — which puts it below average in the Netherlands, 60th in the UK, 38th in Germany, 35th and just above average in France. Ireland has the 8th highest number of universities per capita in the world already. (A new university would not change the latter rank, just push us closer to Norway.) This matters for two reasons. There is a fixed cost in running a university. International rankings are not normalized for size; small universities cannot do well.

The page you linked to – and which you somehow misread as referring to the number of universities per capita despite the rather clear Top 500 (per capita) (most recent) by country at the top of the page – shows that, per capita, Ireland has more universities in the top 500 than any of the four countries you compare us to in terms of university size. (Although we are behind Norway.) If you have any actual research that measures ranking performance against size, then by all means show us, but we haven’t seen it yet.

No. The Shanghai ranking, the QS ranking, the THE ranking and even the Leiden ranking are increasing in the number of faculty.

I’m sorry, but I’m not really certain what you’re trying to say here.

@OMF: “The real solution here is to actually move one of(or parts of) UCD, DCU and Trinity down to Waterford. I’m quite serious.”

Actually move DIT + DCU. Wexford/Waterford and East Cork are actually a pleasant locations. Mildish winters, sunny weather, nice sandy beaches, good fishing, low transport costs.

Now all you have to do is impose full fees on the residual Dublin universities. That might concentrate minds a little.

Brian Snr.

I am neither a economist nor unpartisan in this debate, but I am interested in what this blog would make of the demographic argument that is deployed to make a case for investing in upgrading WIT.

The hea stats website indicate that of the 18,000 people from the South East are currently taking an undergrad programme (around 4% of the 460k people of the SE). 12,000 of these left region (around 2.6% leave the region every 3-4 years).

Two leaps- I guess the majority are middle class kids, who get north of 450 CAO points. I further suppose that many do not come back, they work, marry and settle out of the region.

WIT is run at max capacity (costing around €40 mil per annum to educate 6-7k students. DCU is run on close to double that recurring funding for the same number of students. WIT cannot credibly offer more service whilst maintaining minimum acceptable standards for its awards. With additional funding DCU has not been able to grow its numbers. But given the cache of the university title, and similar funding diet to DCU, WIT can grow to UL’s scale (around 12k students/same budget as DCU) and make an enormous impact on the region. These funding numbers come from Dail questions, student numbers from HEA.

There needs to be a serious backlash against the cult of scale, “world class” and “league tables”. There is no evidence whatsoever that the payback to the economy or to the community justifies anything like the level of obsession and funding invested in this piece of ideology. The primary value, in a narrow economic sense, of universities to the economy is to attract and train the maximum number of STEM students to degree level, in order to provide employees for our many high tech companies. (Although you won’t find many of them in Waterford.) This function could quite easily be performed by the institutes of technology alone, let alone “world class universities”.

World class research is and can be produced by directing that institutes, IoTs and universities, home and abroad, to come together as consortia competing for research funding. PRTLI in Ireland (to some extent) and FP7 in Europe does this. Got a talented research group? Got skype? Doesn’t matter whether you’re in Trinity or WIT, located in Waterford or Dublin. Where we arguably need to scale up is in research, and this can be done very easily. Where we need to maximise student numbers is at the undergraduate level, where a top tier institution in each region guarantees maximum access. Waterford and the south east is an outlier in not having a university. University of Limerick, much closer to other universities than WIT is, has made a massive difference to the local economy in Limerick. To say the existence of a university in a region makes no difference is quite simply naive and wrong.

Those making “scale” arguments, i.e. that “Ireland is only the size of greater Manchester” brigade, would do well to remember that whilst regions of 500K may appear laughably small today, regions of 4.5m may be similarly inconsequential in a few years time. One wonders whether the “centralise, merge or die” attitude so prevalent in the capital these days will extend to abandoning “world class” education completely on this island, in favour of rowing in behind one of the future 150,000 student world class universities across the water in the UK.

The reality of the matter is that Ireland is a small, sparsely populated country. That means we ought to look at what other small, sparsely populated countries are doing, e.g. Wales, Scotland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc. Forget about what the UK, Germany and the Netherlands are doing. And as for Dublin being the only real/world class/critical mass/metropolitan/etc. city in Ireland, that’s neither here nor there. A city of 1.1m people is nothing in the grand scheme of things. We need to think small, competing and collaborating ecosystem of institutions, because scale is a game we will lose. With improving infrastructure, it doesn’t really matter (within reason) where FDI or universities are situated.

All Waterford and the south east wants is to be an primary part in the overall educational and employment network, however the system is organised in the future. Right now that means upgrading WIT.

@Mickey Hickey
“Localism”? No interest in localism at all. But I do happen to believe that a plurality of competing and collaborating institutions is ultimately more productive than a single, large, non-competitive (within the Irish context, thus for national funding), bureaucratic institution — to take an extreme. No problem with interdisciplinarity in this context. In fact, colleges collaborating on large projects can built niche specialities.

Centralisation, as I pointed out, is all very fine, until you realise that with only 4.5m people, Ireland will lose the scale game. No question. China is coming. India is coming. Collaboration is the only hope for scale, collaboration within Ireland and with institutions outside it.

If there is any evidence out there that massive universities consistently outperfom networks of smaller universities, I’d love to see it. Harvard of course has a mere 7,000 undergrads and 21,000 postgrads, slightly larger than NUIG. Harvard is resisting scale at all costs. And yes, I accept that it has massive scale in terms of endowments. But would the US really benefit from merging all the ivy league colleges into one? Does anyone actually believe that would be a good thing? I certainly do not. Merge TCD and UCD and you will, I believe, have something that is less than the some of its parts.

You cannot discount the social, intellectual and economic capital that individually branded and geographically located (and/or sectorally focussed) institutions can generate for the system as a whole. The fact that UCC is in Cork puts the combined weight of every public and private body, and every individual, in Cork behind it. Similarly with other colleges. If universities and IoTs can work together on diverse projects, this capital can be retained, bureaucracy can be minimised (not the total amount of it but the “depth” of it) and effective scale can be achieved. Centralising and merging only moves turf wars under the same roof and removes any notion of competition or collaboration, which is vital, within the sector.

I’m not knocking the Quebec approach, if it’s right for them. But if they are trying to win a scale arms race with the emerging universities of India and Asia, or even with the existing larger or more wealthy institutions, a 6m population is probably not going to cut it. (Although those universities you mention are top universities as is, but will they be after a bout of centralisation?) And anyway, how many undergrads will they lose due to reduced access because it’s a case of “sorry, we don’t do engineering here anymore, try 150km down the road, and by the way, how’s your French?” In all this talk about scale and league tables, we forget about the brass tacks: unearthing the maximum number of STEM students and getting them into high tech jobs. Most IoTs and any university can perform this function, and all the better because there are plenty of colleges, access routes and schemes. Not to be sniffed at.

In any case, what the south east needs is an institution of the same calibre of the universities that is fit for merging, and/or for taking up a particular niche in, for example, a Quebec-style division of labour. I’m sure you’d accept that if such an eventuality is just down the road for Ireland, WIT is currently poorly placed to play an integral and equal part with the 7 universities. Whatever the higher education system looks like in 20 years time, it will still be to some degree distributed (we are a small, well connected island after all), and the south east needs to play an equal role in this system — call it a node in the system. Otherwise you will have a continuation of the current brain drain and diminishing opportunity. We do, after all, pay our taxes like everyone else.