British universities will recognise the Leaving Cert from 2006. UCD president Hugh Brady responds.
Less than three weeks ago, on January 20th, I delivered my inaugural lecture as president of UCD. In the course of that lecture, I predicted a future where Irish universities would have to compete with our international counterparts for the brightest and best of Irish second-level students.
It gives me little satisfaction to have been proved correct so soon and in emphatic fashion by last week's announcement that UCAS - the British equivalent of the points system - will recognise Leaving Certificate grades from 2006. What this means is that, unless some things change radically and fast in Irish higher education, we are on the threshold of an unprecedented brain-drain - with devastating consequences for this country.
I would like to emphasise that I am not advocating any version of a protectionist educational iron curtain here. This argument is not about restriction of choice but about ensuring that young Irish women and men of school-leaving age are given a real and viable option in the shape of a world-class indigenous university sector. To those whose version of patriotism leads them to assume that we need not take these developments too seriously because very few will really want to leave, I will simply suggest a reflection on the current status of the Irish automobile manufacturing industry or textile sector.
In the Irish university sector we are already - and we know we are - in a global competition, for both students and staff.
But we are competing, hampered by serious disadvantages. We are disadvantaged first because outdated budgetary and planning models, which are seriously in need of re-consideration and reform, see us competing for funds at a national level with our own primary and secondary education sectors.
We need in this country a continuum of excellence from primary through secondary and onto higher levels of education - and we need the budgetary and planning models that will facilitate this. Second, we are competing with those - specifically the British university sector - who have won their own argument and persuaded the political leadership that their university sector has to be funded at higher levels.
It is worth recalling that the recent UK higher education debate was all about the right means to achieve an objective on which all were agreed - that the university must be better funded, to a level at least equal to its international competitors.
The argument for increased funding was won elsewhere because of two distinct but related elements: a recognition that the contemporary explosion of knowledge has made the university's traditional teaching role immeasurably more complex than in previous generations; and a consciousness of university research as the engine of development for the knowledge-based innovation economies of tomorrow. In this country, we have policy documents as insightful and enlightened as any in the world.
We have, however, a serious disconnect between policy and practice. While our policy statements are all about the continuum between basic research, carried out at universities, the appropriately skilled graduates and intellectual capital which this produces and sustained economic development and prosperity, our funding practice seems to be driven by short-term expediency at best.
This year's devastating cuts in university funding just make no sense - and leave us dangerously vulnerable in the context of a global competition. It is worth repeating: Irish universities are now competing for the brightest and best Irish second-level students with much better funded institutions a hop, skip and jump - or, if you prefer, a cheap airfare - across the water.
It has to be said that we have not always been good communicators in the Irish universities - we have not done well at telling the good news stories of our various campuses. Nor have we always been as focused on the needs of our students as we should have been. If the urgent challenge now facing us is to be dealt with successfully, it will be through a combination of those of us working in the Irish universities doing a better job in these areas and the current funding impasse being resolved. But, let us be absolutely clear, the former cannot happen without the latter - they must happen together. In a highly competitive international market, change is not best achieved by funding cuts that bring existing activity to a grinding halt. If funding is not available at appropriate levels, benchmarked with international competitors, there will be no story to tell.
My own anxieties about the UCAS-Leaving Certificate development are exacerbated when I reflect on events of recent decades in the Irish health service with which I am very familiar. In the health sector in the 1980s, we cut blindly and brutally. As a direct consequence of this, we had a brain-drain and degradation of capacity and services, with dire consequences for the quality of healthcare delivery.
And how many people are happy with Irish healthcare today? And, to ask the logical next question, how many will be happy with Irish higher education in future decades if we do not learn from our mistakes?
The thing about a brain-drain is that it's very hard to reverse. The Department of Education in Northern Ireland discovered as much in the course of research carried out in relation to education and earnings in Northern Ireland in 2002.
This research demonstrates that many of the leading second-level students from Northern Ireland chose to pursue their third-level studies on the neighbouring island and that few of these returned.
It is the brightest and best of our second-level students who will be targeted by these same universities, who will be recruited abroad, who will for the most part never return and who will contribute to the economic and social development of other countries. Unless we act urgently, we are on the road to perdition.
Dr Hugh Brady is president of University College Dublin.