In the Dark

One of the things I noticed straight away when I moved from the UK to my current job in Ireland is how under-resourced the Irish higher education system is. That realization was driven home still further by the Covid-19 pandemic during which those of us working in Irish universities had to switch to online teaching with precious little support.

Academic staff worked very hard to keep going during the various lockdown periods, but I’m sure I’m not the only person to feel deep regret that we were unable to do things better and that many students have a right to feel they have been let down by the system.

Now that we’re back teaching on campus the problems have not gone away. With a significant number of students prevented from attending lectures by the need to self-isolate we should be making recordings or live streams available, but we lack the equipment to do so properly. I have to carry a webcam and a tripod around campus to record my classes in improvised and not very satisfactory fashion. Contrast with the UK, where proper lecture capture facilities were commonplace in universities long before the pandemic. We are at least a decade behind.

This is one example of a deep crisis in the Irish third level system. Sadly it is by no means clear that the current Government is interested in solving it. There is talk of reducing the “student contribution” (currently €3000, the highest in the EU) because of the cost-of-living crisis but cutting this tuition fee (which is effectively what it is) would reduce the money coming into higher education unless offset by an increase in Government funding. According to this report (from November 2019), core state funding per student in third level institutions fell from about €9K in 2009 to under €5K in 2019.

A sizeable fraction of the income of a university is spent on its staff. In Ireland academic staff are treated as public sector employees which means that salary levels are set centrally. After being cut after the financial crisis they are now fairly generous and increase in line with overall pay settlements. Academic staff get annual increments and can get promoted, which adds to costs on top of the cost-of-living increases.

And that’s the crunch.

If the resource per student is decreasing but the salary bill is increasing, universities have to find other ways of generating income (which has been particularly difficult during the pandemic) or to increase the number of students. Keeping staff and student numbers constant means sliding into deficit. The way out of this many have found is to freeze permanent academic hires and instead take on casual teaching staff that can be paid lower wages than full-time staff. With no disrespect at all to people employed on such contracts, who generally do an excellent job, I feel we are short-changing students if they are not taught by academics who are active in research.

Take my current Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University as an example. This has a student-staff ratio of about 15. That would be considered quite high for a physics department in the United Kingdom, but lower ratios are financially viable there because the fee income per student is much higher and physics departments bring in significant research income that makes a contribution to both direct and indirect costs. The latter is very difficult in Ireland because of the lack of research funding, especially in basic sciences; fortunately we have been relatively successful in generating research income and have recently increased student numbers, so we’re keeping our head above water. For now.

The price is that all academic staff in the Department have very heavy teaching loads – about five modules a year. That is way higher than physics departments in the UK, where most staff teach at most a couple. That makes it very difficult to stay competitive in research.

The problem is that science subjects are (a) more expensive to teach and (b) have limited capacity to grow because of constraints on, e.g., laboratory space (and the fact that there is a limited pool of suitably qualified school-leavers). As a consequence there is a strong incentive for universities to expand in subjects that are cheaper to teach. Something has to be done to ensure that Ireland’s universities can continue to provide education in a broad range of subjects.

Given the funding situation and the charges currently levied on students, it amazes me that more don’t seek their tertiary education elsewhere in the EU where fees are much lower (and in some places non-existent) especially since there is such a terrible shortage of student housing In Ireland. Does the Government really want to continue giving its young people such strong incentives to emigrate?

I was going to end this post there, having stated that the mismatch between between income and salary costs is the core problem facing Irish universities. As I went along though I came to think that the really basic problem is at a deeper level than that. Irish universities are public institutions but the political parties that have dominated Irish government for decades are of a neoliberal hue and are at best ambivalent towards the public sector. There are many in the current Government who would privatize everything if they could get away with it. They are pragmatic, though, and realize that these institutions are actually popular, just like the NHS in England. It is however very difficult for public institutions to function when the Government in charge doesn’t really believe in them.

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