Colm Harmon has a nice little piece on some (possibly) unintended consequences of current government higher education policy here.
Category: Higher education
Some of my students today complained – softly – about the workings of the Back to Education Allowance. Like many such schemes globally it allows for some mechanism to maintain welfare payments whilst returning to full time education at both second and third level. Laudable enough, although I haven’t seen this evaluated in terms of impact but then again what is new for Irish policy.
The full text of the Hunt Report is now available on the Irish Times website linked here.
The working paper is now available. Conclusions are by and large as before (2, 3), but details are different. This is the abstract:
The research performance of business scholars on the island of Ireland is evaluated based on their number of publication, number of citations, h-index and the same divided by the numbers of years since the first publication. Data were taken from Scopus. There is a large variation in both life-time achievement and annual production. Almost half of the 748 scholars have not published in an academic journal. Men perform better than women. More senior people perform better. There are distinct differences between disciplines, with accountancy performing poorly. On average, scholars in Northern Ireland perform better than scholars in the Republic. However, Trinity College Dublin has the top rank among the eleven business schools; Queen’s University Belfast and University College Dublin share the second place; and NUI Galway and the University of Ulster share the fourth spot. Irish business schools specialize in particular research areas so that mergers would lead to schools that can support a broader range of cutting-edge education.
This is the last opportunity to correct the data. (UPDATE: One name removed because of a legal threat.)
Bagues and Zinovyeva have an intriguing piece over at Vox. There’s evidence that all-male promotions committees discriminate against female candidates (in Spain). The solution is sex quotas for committees. As women are underrepresented in higher ranks, this would put a disproportionate burden on the current generation of female senior academics. A neat intergenerational trade-off so.
Bagues and Zinovyeva’s propose to use sex quotas, but small ones. This may satisfy all concerns.