Sir, – Karlin Lillington's recent column ("Graduates must bridge divide between arts and science", Business Opinion, June 4th) is just the latest in a growing list of articles extolling the value of broad-based, multidisciplinary undergraduate education. Indeed, the presumed superiority of broad-based education over more discipline-centred approaches lies at the heart of many of the changes being proposed by the Task Group on University Selection and Entry, led by the president of Maynooth University, Dr Philip Nolan.
While broad-based education has a certain appeal, changes to education policy must be informed by evidence, not plausibility. Anyone who has taught on a multidisciplinary degree programme, as I have for many years, will appreciate the very significant difficulties associated with achieving depth as well as breadth in even a four-year period; and if you don’t achieve depth, you rarely get all of those “higher order” attributes, such as critical thinking and problem solving, that we supposedly desire in our graduates.
We need to tread carefully here and those who advocate a multidisciplinary approach to third- level education should really conduct a rigorous analysis of how graduates from existing multidisciplinary programmes have fared in their careers. How many graduates from such programmes, for example, have no option but to pursue further studies in order to achieve the necessary depth in a particular discipline? There is a knowledge gap here and it needs to be filled before we stumble into unvalidated approaches to third-level education. – Yours, etc,
Dr GREG FOLEY, BE MS
Associate Dean
for Teaching and Learning,
School of Biotechnology ,
Dublin City University,
Dublin 9.