Cutting investment in education seems equitable but it's a false economy

LEFT FIELD:IT HAS BEEN a great summer – lots of sun, some great new movies, the attractions of the World Cup, Newcastle United back in the premiership, what more could one want?

In addition, my diary has become much easier to manage since my term of office as DCU president came to an end. I’m not exactly living a life of leisure, but at the same time I do now have time for the occasional meeting with friends over a cup of coffee, and my family are beginning to recognise me again without having to be introduced.

So nothing to complain about, then? Well, not exactly, no. I am still focused on Irish higher education and to be frank, not everything is perfect there. But let me go back in time a little.

Ten years ago, just as I began my term of office as president of Dublin City University, Ireland’s higher education sector had made very little impact internationally. One or two of our universities were known here and there, and there was a general feeling that our teaching programmes were not at all bad; but we were certainly not seen as being among the global leaders.

When the first international league table was published by the Academic Rankings Unit of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003, only two Irish universities made it into the top 500, and neither of them were very high in the list. In fairness, this particular league table is weighted heavily in favour of large, science-intensive, well-endowed universities with Nobel prize winners among their staff. For all sorts of reasons we were never going to score very highly in that setting, nor would universities from most countries outside of the United States, and to a lesser extent the UK.

Then in 2005, the journal Times Higher Education, in association with Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), introduced their annual world university rankings, which have become highly influential.

In 2005 the highest placed Irish university was TCD, at number 111. UCD was at number 221, and no other Irish university featured in the top 500. Only four years’ later, in 2009, TCD had reached number 43, UCD was at 89, UCC at 207, NUI Galway at 243, DCU at 279, and NUI Maynooth and the University of Limerick between 400 and 500. Irish universities had not exactly moved into global leadership positions, but they had made significant progress and as a result, Ireland could now be taken seriously as a centre of learning and research.

That was 2009, and this is 2010, and the picture has changed. Last week the QS rankings (now no longer in partnership with Times Higher Education, whose own rankings will appear later this week) were published, and Trinity is out of the top 50, and UCD out of the top 100. Others, notably UCC, have made progress, but the overall picture for Irish higher education is bleak.

And in case you thought that things may soon get better, in this context they won’t. The QS rankings essentially record the picture as of the end of the last academic year, and since then all sorts of bad things have happened to third-level education in Ireland.

The key bad thing is that we have been forced to reduce staffing by 6 per cent (alongside significant budget cuts), and this will further erode the student-to-staff ratio. The impact of that will be a further serious decline in the league table position of our universities, which is likely to accelerate over the next two or three years, almost regardless of what immediate steps are now taken.

We could respond to this in a number of ways. We could say that this is all just a lot of hot air and means nothing; we should not be influenced too much by league tables. I suspect that this position could seem attractive to some, but it would be most unwise. Rankings determine not just the status of our universities in the eyes of international students and partners (which is bad enough), but also the attractiveness of Ireland as a place for investment, particularly knowledge intensive investment.

We could say that this is a great shame, but times are difficult and higher education has to take its medicine like everyone else. There is some truth in that, for example it is right that we should expect the same pay cuts and economies as everywhere else.

But in terms of our willingness to resource higher education as a whole, this is not about pleasing the academic community, it is about giving this country a serious chance to climb out of recession. Kill our reputation for good education, and you kill more than academic ambitions: you undermine our economic opportunities. When I talk to international businesspeople, the two things they always mention that make a critical difference in deciding on investment is the quality of education and research, and the tax régime; everything else is of far less significance.

If we really want to re-discover our capacity for economic growth and social progress, we have no option: we must develop and resource education. It’s as simple as that. We have all the ingredients to make this work: committed people, a tradition for learning, an interest in innovation. For heaven’s sake, let us not pass up the opportunity to get out of our current difficulties.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is a former president of Dublin City University