Category: Higher education

Ireland’s economists in the world

I’ve taught myself the black art of web-scraping.

There are many rankings of economists and economics departments. IDEAS/RePEc uses a reasonable method and is kept up to date. It also provides rankings by and of countries. Ireland is now ranked 33rd in the world. Ireland’s economists are thus about as good as its soccer players (ranked 31st).

It wasn’t always thus. IDEAS/RePEc has published country rankings since 2005. Ireland’s position has steadily improved over time, as can be seen from this graph. As a number of economists are planning to emigrate, that trend may reverse.

Ranking of Irish Universities (and Economics Departments)

Rankings are funny things. Economists love them. There are rankings by department, by citation, and by subdiscipline. My favourite one is the top dead economist. You’d think it would be Adam Smith, but no.

Some people even rank their rankings.

There are even rankings of business schools, academics, and celebrity economists in Ireland, thanks to Richard Tol and colleagues. The rankings aren’t without controversy. In particular, some see ranking as academic bureaucracy and nothing more, others (like frequent IrishEconomy poster Ernie Ball) point to the perverse incentives such rankings produce in academic life, as well as other serious issues. Ferdinand Von Prondzynski summarises the arguments well here. Here is another particularly harsh assessment of these rankings.

Today’s university rankings show two Irish universities and economics departments in a particularly good light. TCD and UCD come out really well in several areas. Other universities, including mine, don’t feature as prominently at all. Brian Lucey has done the spade work on his blog going through the report, and I reproduce his summary below the fold. Some remarkable findings in there–TCD mathematics is 15th in the world, TCD psychology is top 50, for example–as well as the news that UCD and TCD economics departments are both in the top 50 100 (ht Enda H). Well done to them.

I’m particularly interested in commenters’ reactions to this latest report, and what it might mean for universities in Ireland that a. don’t make the cut in terms of rankings, and b. those that do. Rather than rehashing the tired “rankings-good/rankings-bad” argument, let’s focus, if we can, on what these rankings imply for the funding each university receives by subject area, in the light of the Hunt Report and it’s eventual implementation.  Should resources flow disproportionately to the ‘winners’–TCD and UCD–or alternatively to other universities to bring up capacity? Should all universities do everything, or should there be partitions by subject area? Should UCD’s mathematics department, to pick an example at random, give up and go home, given than TCD’s is so obviously world class? Take a look at the summary below to begin.

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Revised Employment Control Framework

The ECF for the higher education sector has been revised. Many elements from the last version have been changed. The last draft introduced a range of measures including: the need for specific pre-approval of all individual posts (exchequer funded or not) from a small central government committee; specific quotas for each university regardless of how successful or not they actually were in attaining research income; and decisions made on the suitability of academic hires on the basis of their alignment to government strategy documents.

The new version is a vastly improved document. All of the above elements have been removed. There are sector-wide quotas, in keeping with the need to reduce costs, but allocation with respect of research posts to each university will depend, as you would expect, on how much of the research funding the university actually wins in the competitions administered by SFI, HRB etc., Furthermore, the specific pre-approval process has been shelved as has the frankly puzzling attempt to impose quotas on posts secured from non-exchequer funds. The latter should surely be welcomed by everyone.

The main reason for a revised employment control framework was to deal with pension liabilities arising from contract research staff. In this regard, the new draft forces a fully-funded proviso on to all new grant applications, with grant applicants (exchequer or non-exchequer) now being required to cost 20 per cent of employee salaries into grant applications for pension purposes, starting with new applications. This is a blunt way of dealing with this issue, and there should be further debate on this. In general, the treatment of contract researchers as if they were civil servants in terms of contracts and pensions is one of the defining issues in Irish research at present. It continuously creates confusion on all sides. Attracting bright researchers to Ireland is a legitimate goal of government policy supported by much research on how to create thriving cities. Placing such contractual and bureaucratic impediments to this is counterproductive and groups that represent contract researchers have been among the most vocal in pointing this out.

Hopefully, the new document signals a more productive debate about higher education in Ireland and an improvement in the relations between the universities and the state, which seemed to have degenerated substantially at the beginning of this year. Universities do contribute to both economic growth and to the development and maintenance of healthy democracies in ways that go beyond the current linear big-tech innovation models being employed by government. Attracting top researchers into Ireland on a much larger scale funded by a much more diverse range of sources is one avenue that the country still has open as an attainable policy goal even at a time of dwindling resources and, in fact, reductions in property prices and the general cost of living may make Ireland a more attractive place for European-funded researchers as these grants have retained their nominal value.

Employment Control Framework

I reproduce the full text of the ECF over the page (via 9th level Ireland blog). I really would encourage people commenting to read the document first as its not very long. Some of the argument has conflated the provisions with university funding, with some people complaining about the ECF because it limits academic numbers and some people supporting it basically for the same reason. The issue is not the resourcing but rather the process of hiring in universities and the stipulation in this document that all university hiring will need to be specifically approved by a small central government committee along with similar provisions about reallocating people across institutions and so on.

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Universities should take to the ‘lifeboats’

Common wisdom suggests the state will not be ready to co-fund the IMF-EU deal by mid 2012. Another deal will accompany a slash in payments to the social sectors including Education. Is the third level sector ready for such a crisis?

The Irish State pays a core grant to our third-level institutions for each undergraduate student, and, in an equal amount, funds the majority of research and postgraduate fees (scholarships). The latter is managed by a proliferation of various third level education bodies which we label Quangos. The sector has developed an unnaturally high dependency on the public finances. This dependence is currently anywhere between 65 to 88 per cent in most Higher Education Institutes

The funding of third-level Quangos now represent an unsustainable overhead on the sector, as this form of finance flowing from the State is on the decline. The indirect costs or the administrative structures that have mushroomed during the boom (which distributed State money) are now vestigial and are turning into a major financial headache and constraint on the sector. The HEI’s must replace these funds with international research grants and postgraduate students. The Quangos are largely ill equipped to induce and manage this change.

The Universities, while undertaking many good reforms, made the mistake of allowing indirect costs inside universities to grow to over 50 per cent. Frontline lecturers’ salaries now only account for 25 per cent of the overall cost of the sector, when we include the overheads of Quangos. Academic salaries have collapsed by 25 per cent (net) since 2008. Most academic units have also lost up to 15 per cent of their staff via retirements or voluntary quits. These savings are returned and retained by the State and not by the Universities.  The oversized non-academic and undersized academic units are finding it a challenge to refocus efforts into securing funds from outside of Ireland. Academics need to be empowered to make such change happen.

What is the solution proposed by State and its agencies to cope with the current crisis?

An imposed agreement, under the false premises of Croke Park, to increase productivity levels of declining numbers of frontline lecturing staff is their answer. Not surprisingly, these productivity increases can never pay for what are now largely indirect costs in the sector.  New income streams are needed: higher levels of international students who pay fees, more EU and Global research funding successes, and private sources.

Yet, all hiring and promotions (whether funded by the State or not), that have come under the State’s employment control, are now banned. The most recent instalment of employment control wants to redeploy academics within and across institutions. There are even conditions on the nature of research that is allowed. The focus of such is on the disciplines that will drive the smart economy (see http://des-fitzgerald.com/ecf/).

This is a ludicrous attempt to turn academics into public servants. The agents of the State seem to have no idea how knowledge is created and dispersed. Academics in a global market face competition from serious creators of knowledge and find every international student and grant is a hard battle won.  Publishing in the leading journals and university presses is like winning Olympic medals in terms of a lifetime dedication to the cause. Academic credentials need to be first class, a Ph.D. from a top University and ground breaking publications. Academics need the time and space to perform at these levels.  Imposing constraints on academic freedom and tenure will only give our competitors an advantage over us, deter international students and grants from coming here and could rupture our growing reputation in scholarship internationally. The idea that an academic in UCD that gets a research grant from a major donor should first see if there is someone surplus to requirements inside UCD and then search in other universities, or even State departments, before hiring a post-doc clearly indicates to me that the state has no idea how knowledge is created. Incentives are for academics to leave Ireland rather than refocus efforts.

What do we do?

Universities have to realise the State is broke. Just like the State should have understood the Irish Banks were broke, now the Universities have to drop the State like a hot potato (Taxpayers and the IMF-EU would approve).

Trinity by the nature of its charter and academic ownership of its property can break from State faster than most.

The first move would be to establish income streams from undergraduate fees, increase the number of international students and external research income.

Most Universities like Trinity already have private enterprise on campus in terms of the library shop, rented accommodation, a Foundation office and Campus Companies. These could turn a higher profit to fertilise academic scholarship.

The University of Dublin, and the National University of Ireland, could create new colleges. Let’s call the one alongside Trinity College, “Christchurch College”. Christchurch could hire and promote and pay pensions on a private basis funded by the new income streams.  All existing contracts could be honoured by Trinity College.

The nature of self governance in a third-level institution means that academics rule. They can promote academic scholarship, and while doing so they can control all non-academic units and can easily restructure the internal indirect costs over-time and reduce them to less than 30 per cent, retaining these savings to invest in Education and Research.

The top slicing of finance by education Quangos would be removed and most importantly their ability to constrain academic freedom to create knowledge for use in a global society would come to a deserved end.

Some universities have endowments and assets that could buy the limited time to achieve such academic and financial security.

Even if the State does not default the case for the third-level institutions to break away from the influence of the State and its agencies is growing with every minute.

The Irish State is a sinking ship and academics need to escape on lifeboats labelled ‘University Charters for use when Academic Scholarship is put at risk from the State, Church or private interests’.  The Founders’ bequest throughout the centuries gives academics an instrument for use when academic scholarship is threatened. Academics need to use it now.