Connect: The Leaving Cert results will be out next week. As ever, they'll trigger demented female screeching ("Ohmygod!") and gormless male grunting ("Uhnuh!"). Many who sat the memory test will be hoping for specific college places; some will get what they want, others won't. Mind you, even those who get their wish will enter a down-at-heel third-level system.
Irish universities and institutes of technology are sorely under-funded now. A Royal Irish Academy report this week estimated they need €450 million to compete with the better European colleges. To fund most of this, the RIA wants a return to third-level fees. However, Minister for Education Mary Hanafin has rejected the RIA's call. There are, after all, few votes in fees.
Meanwhile, although the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) acknowledges that third-level colleges are under-funded, it says that reintroducing fees would not solve the crisis. It argues that the best solution would be "better and more targeted state investment". (Of course it would, but dream on!). Anyway, it's unrealistic to expect a student's union to advocate a return to fees.
It's sad but thoroughly predictable that Irish higher education has come to this. Despite unprecedented wealth, the State allocates a mere 1.6 per cent of GNP for third-level colleges. Even if it were to give all of the RIA's additional €450 million, it would still leave higher education getting just about two per cent of GNP. Some EU countries give closer to three per cent.
As long ago as 1926, Bertrand Russell could see the trend. "The cure [ for the diminution of disinterested learning] lies in the creation of an educated democracy, willing to spend money on aims which our captains of industry are unable to appreciate," he wrote. He always argued that utilitarian knowledge needed to be made fruitful by disinterested investigation. He was right too.
We know that many of the great advances - electricity, flight and antibiotics, for instance - were at first purely theoretical or discovered by chance. Only afterwards were they found to have practical applications. The lesson surely is that in many cases if you aim too intensely, you're likely to miss the target. There must be at least some research for its own sake.
It's fair enough that the community should expect benefits for supporting students. Nobody sane wishes a return to a time in which the idle rich infested universities and became increasingly dissipated in the name of becoming "gentlemen". But some learning without an obvious practical application (or even without any at all), has to be encouraged too. The economy is not all there is to life.
Of course, institutions have to plan, but the excess of "strategy initiative programme development proposals" or whatever colleges choose to call them (just string five or six longish nouns together) is choking learning that has no motive beyond the desire to understand the world better. It's always a balance, of course, but higher education is now shackled by undue and impractical "practicality".
By all means create vibrant links with industry - but turning universities into R&D units for Ibec is cheap. Yet that's the Government's aim in the name of "the future of the economy". (Get a 120 per cent, 40-year mortgage and work till you're 80. Great, eh?). This week, Ibec described as "very disappointing" a report that insufficient academic research was "commercialised".
It's hard to know what can be done when such a narrow-minded mentality prevails without and even within higher education. There seems to be little ability or even desire within higher education to oppose the ignorance. Those with power in the sector repeatedly roll over and get their middle management to impose more and more "belt-tightening" on most of the troops.
The idea of industrial action to try and stop the rot is never discussed - at least never seriously. It would, of course, present a difficult PR battle, because most people consider too many academics to be idlers - "You teach only X hours a week?!" - so it's probably impossible to win. Meanwhile the new "Ohmygods!" and "Uhnuhs!" face deteriorating conditions.
It could yet be that the middle-class parents of most third-level students will twig the rip-off. Sure, it's great not to have to pay fees but through rising class sizes, lack of equipment and being turned into mere cogs for the economy, "Ohmygod!" and "Uhnuh!" are getting short-changed too. At some point, there will be votes in funding Irish education properly.
In the meantime the Government will continue to spout fee-free, parent-pleasing nonsense about private-sector "funding". But unlike in the US, there is very little tradition of such philanthropy here. You could argue that in the US people donate money to continue the capitalism that made them their loot. Whatever the reason, they still give. Ireland is different.
In many regards, third-level education (like, say, air travel) has become passé. It's much more common now than a generation ago, even though the principle of selection too often remains social and a reintroduction of fees would hardly help in curtailing this. Still, it needs to be funded properly and not sold to industry. Otherwise, it will become the educational equivalent of McDonald's.