Sir, – Stephen Donnelly’s article highlighting the crisis in the third-level sector is timely, but his analysis makes the usual mistake of blaming all of the ills of the sector on the provider side (Education Today, December 11th).
The primary reason for the decline in the quality of Irish graduates is our hugely increased third-level participation rates. To assume that participation rates can increase significantly without a reduction in overall standards defies logic.
There is an in-built assumption in the analysis of education generally that anybody is capable of studying to any level. This is clearly not the case and the various institutions have responded in the only way possible; reducing academic standards and gradually transforming third level into an extended form of second level. The result is that employers see graduates who have been consistently “spoon fed” throughout their education and are not equipped to survive in the real world.
The only way out of this problem is not to obsess about work practices, which are definitely not the problem. Academics have never spent as much time as they do now on “teaching and learning”. Young lecturers, these days, are light years ahead of their counterparts from the 1980s in terms of their commitment to teaching.
Instead, we need to radically streamline the honours degree sector and have a serious discussion about the level of education that is appropriate for young people who are being subjected, often reluctantly, to the third-level “draft”. – Yours, etc,