Details here.
Year: 2012
The DF has released a new note on deposit trends at the Irish covered banks – it is here.
Worth looking at to see how Ireland is being marketed to investors, lots of good data here too. Of course there’s a little spin here and there, but overall an interesting powerpoint deck.
Willem Buiter writes in the FT on the odds and consequences of Greece exiting the eurozone: see here.
The piece draws on a longer article by Buiter and Rahbari from last week.
From the longer article:
[T]he positions of the main EA policymakers seem to have evolved and now suggest a greater willingness by EA creditors and the ECB to support vulnerable, but compliant EA member states under attack. In our view, EA leaders have come to the understanding that the financial, economic and political cost to the whole EA (and indeed to the EU and the global economy) of material EA break-up (that is exit of other nations than Greece) is substantially larger than the cost of extending conditional support. But EA creditor countries have also made increasingly clear that they no longer believe that the costs to the creditor countries of EA break-up or EA exit by one EA country would exceed the costs of creating a one-side fiscal union, a transfer-Europe without a commensurate quid pro quo as regards fiscal austerity and structural reform in the beneficiary countries, underpinned if necessary by far-reaching and unprecedented transfer of fiscal and wider economic sovereignty by the beneficiary countries. The EA creditor countries undoubtedly view the cost of providing unconditional and/or unlimited or open-ended fiscal and financial support to fiscally vulnerable EA countries as a price not worth paying to keep a single non-performing EA member state in the club.
The HEA has published its plans for reforming higher education in Ireland. A high level summary is here. There are two more substantive documents (here and here) that partly overlap. There are two core ideas. First, “technological universities” are introduced. Presumably, these will replace the “institutes of technology”. This is to large degree a matter of relabelling. If this satisfies the demands to have a university in every county then so be it. Ireland would follow the international trend to call each and any 3rd level education entity a “university”. Besides, some (many?) of the ITs already grant PhDs and are thus universities in all but name.
The second idea is more controversial. The HEA wants consolidation, through associations, clusters and mergers. Indeed, technological universities will come from a “consolidation of two or more institutions”. On the one hand, it is high time to rationalize the bewildering number of institutions in higher education. I have argued that there too many, small economic departments. Similarly, Irish business schools are too small to credibly support a broad curriculum. There is a fixed cost to running a department, and small department spent a disproportionate amount of time on administration.
On the other hand, scale for scale’s sake is silly. The HEA is not particularly clear about what research and teaching should (not) be consolidated and why.
I would argue that, for research, 2-3 centres per subdiscipline is plenty. For teaching, 3-4 locations for a bachelor’s, and 2-3 for master’s and PhD is enough — per discipline. For those activities, quality beats location. I’d rather talk to / be taught by a good researcher / professor than the one next door. Silicon Valley is not because it is close to any old university, but because it is close to Stanford. For evening and weekend classes, and more vocational training, you do want close ties to local businesses and therefore a denser network of locations.
UPDATE: The Independent reports on the race to become the first Technological University.
The Examiner reports that the president of Cork IT thinks that TU are too university-like. Cork IT is, I presume, free to remain an Institute of Technology. As it would be one of few ITs, it would be free to re-define the IT concept in Dr Murphy’s image.
The Examiner also notes that “distance from home is a major factor in third level participation”. I would argue that people should be prepared to travel for a quality education.