Third Level Ireland – The Core Problem

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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The Necessity for De-Anglicising Irish Universities

Way back in 1892 Douglas Ross Hyde (who later became the First President of Ireland) delivered a famous speech to the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin on the subject of The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland. You can find the text of the speech here, and it’s well worth reading because much of what Hyde says is still relevant to the state of independent Ireland. It’s by no means a xenophobic anti-English rant, by the way, if that’s what you are tempted to infer it is based on the title.

I was struck by a theme which comes up repeatedly in Hyde’s speech. Here, for example:

It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this half-way house –how it continues to apparently hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them; how it continues to clamour for recognition as a distinct nationality, and at the same time throws away with both hands what would make it so.

Having moved to Ireland to take up a position in an Irish university relatively recently I have been particularly struck by the tendency of those in charge of higher education in Ireland to copy slavishly the actions of the English government. I say `English’ specifically because higher education is devolved within the UK and there are different policies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. While it is true that we haven’t got a REF or a TEF yet or ridiculously high tuition fees, but that is probably just because of inertia. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if any or all of these were introduced before too long.

(As things stand students at Irish universities do not have to pay tuition fees as such but they do have to pay a `student contribution’ of up to €3000, which is a fee in all but name. There is more state help for disadvantaged students in Ireland than in England too. In most respects the situation here is similar to the regime that held in England prior to 2012, when £9000 year fees were brought in following the Browne Review. The question is whether England will cut university fees before Ireland gets round to increasing them. )

The current Irish government – which is of neoliberal hue – is presiding over a worsening situation in Irish universities, with funding for Irish undergraduate students failing to keep up with increasing numbers. It is hard to resist the feeling that starving the system of state funding is a precursor to increasing student fees to levels seen in England. At the moment English universities have the highest tuition fees in Europe. After Brexit it will be Ireland that takes that dubious honour within the EU.

The situation is even worse at postgraduate level, about which there seems to have been no thought whatsoever at government levels. In contrast to most European countries there is very little state funding for Masters courses in Ireland, so those wanting to do postgraduate degrees generally have to fund their own fees (over €6K per annum in physics) and living expenses. When final-year undergraduate students ask for advice about doing a Masters one is morally obliged to point out to them that they can do a high-quality course in, e.g., Germany or The Netherlands essentially for free, and that’s what many very able students do. Some might return, and bring their skills and knowledge back to Ireland but many won’t. The landscape of higher-education in Ireland does not encourage them to come back.

So what’s the answer to these woes? Well, it won’t solve everything, but a good start would be to stop looking at England for a way to run higher education and look instead at continental models. In this respect Brexit could prove to be an excellent opportunity for Ireland to reinvent itself as a fully European country. Over the years, largely driven by its membership of the European Union, Ireland has steadily reduced its economic dependency on trade with the United Kingdom and increased its connections with mainland Europe. Brexit will probably accelerate that trend.

I think that Ireland now needs to re-examine other sectors and stop the slavish copying of the idiotic policies of English politicians. It could do worse than to start with higher education.

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Can UK Science Survive Outside the EU?

Please watch the following video made by the organization Scientists for EU. You could also read the document referred to in the video (“International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base – 2013”) which can be found here.

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The Renewed Threat to STEM

A couple of years ago, soon after taking over as Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) at the University of Sussex, I wrote a blog post called The Threat to STEM from HEFCE’s Funding Policies about how the funding policies of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) were extremely biased against STEM disciplines. The main complaint I raised then was that the income per student for science subjects does not adequately reflect the huge expense of teaching these subjects compared to disciplines in the arts and humanities. The point is that universities now charge the same tuition fee for all subjects (usually £9K per annum) while the cost varies hugely across disciplines: science disciplines can cost as much as £16K per annum per student whereas arts subjects can cost as little as £6K. HEFCE makes a small gesture towards addressing this imbalance by providing an additional grant for “high cost” subjects, but that is only just over £1K per annum per student, not enough to make such courses financially viable on their own. And even that paltry contribution has been steadily dwindling.  In effect, fees paid by arts students are heavily subsidising the sciences across the Higher Education sector.

The situation was bad enough before last week’s announcement of an immediate £150M cut in HEFCE’s budget. Once again the axe has fallen hardest on STEM disciplines. Worst of all, a large part of the savings will be made retrospectively, i.e. by clawing back money that had already been allocated and which institutions had assumed in order to plan their budgets. To be fair, HEFCE had warned institutions that cuts were coming in 2015/16:

This means that any subsequent changes to the funding available to us from Government for 2015-16, or that we have assumed for 2016-17, are likely to affect the funding we are able to distribute to institutions in the 2015-16 academic year. This may include revising allocations after they have already been announced. Accordingly, institutions should plan their budgets prudently.

However, this warning does not mention the possibility of cuts to the current year (i.e. 2014-15). No amount of prudent planning of budgets will help when funding is taken away retrospectively, as it is now to the case. I should perhaps explain that funding allocations are made by HEFCE in a lagged fashion, based on actual student numbers, so that income for the academic year 2014-15 is received by institutions during 15/16. In fact my institution, in common with most others, operates a financial year that runs from August 1st to July 31st and I’ve just been through a lengthy process of setting the budget from August 1st 2015 onward; budgets are what I do most of the time these days, if I’m honest. I thought I had finished that job for the time being, but look:

In October 2015, we will notify institutions of changes to the adjusted 2014-15 teaching grants we announced in March 20158. These revised grant tables will incorporate the pro rata reduction of 2.4 per cent. This reduction, and any other changes for individual institutions to 2014-15 grant, will be implemented through our grant payments from November 2015. We do not intend to reissue 2014-15 grant tables to institutions before October 2015, but institutions will need to reflect any changes relating to 2014-15 in their accounts for that year (i.e. the current academic year). Any cash repayments due will be confirmed as part of the October announcements.

On top of this, any extra students recruited as as  result of the government scrapping student number controls won’t attract any support at all from HEFCE, so we wll only get the tuition fee.And the government says it wants the number of STEM students to increase? Someone tell me how that makes sense.

What a mess! It’s going to be back to the drawing board for me and my budget. And if a 2.4 per cent cut doesn’t sound much to you then you need to understand it in terms of how University budgets work. It is my job – as the budget holder for MPS – to ensure that the funding that comes in to my School is spent as efficiently and effectively on what the School is meant to do, i.e. teaching and research. To that end I have to match income and expenditure as closely as possible. It is emphatically not the job of the School to make a profit: the target I am given is to return a small surplus (actually 4 per cent of our turnover) to contribute to longer-term investments. I’ve set a budget that does this, but now I’ll have to wait until October to find out how much I have to find in terms of savings to absorb the grant cut. It’s exasperating when people keep moving the goalposts like this. One would almost think the government doesn’t care about the consequences of its decisions, as long as it satisfies its fixation with cuts.

And it’s not only teaching that is going to suffer. Another big slice of savings (£52M) is coming from scrapping the so-called “transitional relief” for STEM departments who lost out as a result of the last Research Excellence Framework. This again is a policy that singles out STEM disciplines for cuts. You can find the previous allocations of transitional relief in an excel spreadsheet here. The cash cuts are largest in large universities with big activities in STEM disciplines – e.g. Imperial College will lose £10.9M previous allocated, UCL about £4.3M, and Cambridge about £4M. These are quite wealthy institutions of course, and they will no doubt cope, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable for HEFCE to break a promise.

This cut in fact won’t alter my School’s budget either. Although we were disappointed with the REF outcome in terms of league table position, we actually increased our QR income. As an institution the University of Sussex only attracted £237,174 in transitional relief so this cut is small potatoes for us, but that doesn’t make this clawback any more palatable from the point of view of the general state of health of STEM disciplines in the United Kingdom.

These cuts are also directly contrary to the claim that the UK research budget is “ring-fenced”. It clearly isn’t, and with a Comprehensive Spending Review coming up many of us are nervous that these cuts are just a foretaste of much worse things to come. Research Councils are being asked to come up with plans based on a 40% cut in cash.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Loans for PhD Fees?

Just a short post to remind (or perhaps just tell) interested parties that the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is running a consultation on issues connected with postgraduate education. According to the BIS website:

We’re seeking views on proposals to introduce loans for postgraduate taught master’s degrees and to improve support for research students.

The consultation closes on May 29th 2015. The Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society are putting together collective responses for Physics and Astronomy respectively, but anyone can submit an opinion.

The scope of the consultation seems carefully worded as not to suggest explicitly  that loans might be extended to postgraduate research (i.e. PhD) students, but the implication is there. If the system of providing research council scholarships to PhD students were to be scrapped in favour of loans I think that would have a devastating effect on the future of UK science, as another sizeable loan on top of the debts accumulated as an undergraduate would put most potential research students completely off the idea of doing a PhD.

I wonder though if there might be actually be a limited role for loans in funding PhD students that might actually have a positive effect. I’ve stated before on this blog that I’m not opposed to the principle that students who can afford to make a contribution to the cost of their education should be required to do so, as this releases funding to support students who can’t afford to make such a contribution. I’ve never agreed with transferring the entire burden onto the student – which the current system effectively does – but I think it is reasonable for students to chip in a few grand when they can. It is true that having a better educated population benefits the country as a whole, which is why the taxpayer should support university students, but there is no question that the students themselves do benefit financially so they should share some of the cost too. Offering susbsidised loans to enable them to do this makes it quite a reasonable proposition.

One advantage of students having to contribute to their fees emanates from the fact that people tend to value things more if they have to pay for them. It seems quite clear to me that students, generally speaking, show far greater levels of engagement with their courses now that they are investing their own money in them.

Universities charge fees for posgraduate courses too, including the PhD, though these are much lower than for undergraduates. At my institution, the University of Sussex, for example, fees for a PhD in a science subject are about £4K per annum. Students funded by a research council bursary get this fee paid on their behalf on top of a stipend of around £14k per annum, and most are probably not even aware that the fee even exists. Students not in receipt of external funding usually have either have to pay their fee by working for it (possibly by teaching) or have to convince the institution to waive it, in which case the Department concerned does not cover its costs. If a student has a bursary that covers a fee plus a stipend for up to 4 years there isn’t much of an incentive for a PhD student to take a shorter time to complete.

So my suggestion is that it might be worth thinking about moving to a system wherein PhD students would be able to access loans to cover their fees rather than having them funded by a research council bursary or by having to work to earn the money. Such a scheme would save the cash-strapped research councils part of what they currently contribute and it would actually help students finance their own PhD if they had no access to such contributions. Having to borrow the money to pay the fee might deter some potential PhD applicants, but it might also improve completion rates by giving an incentive to finish promptly rather than hanging about. Note that a student with a PhD can expect to earn, on average, about 23 per cent more over a lifetime than someone only holding a Bachelors degree so it seems to me to be reasonable to ask a student to stump up part of the cost of doing a research degree through a loan which need only be paid back when the salary reaches a certain level.

I think this suggestion does have a positive side, but it is by no means a complete solution to the problem that, at least in the UK, we produce many more people with PhDs than are needed to sustain academic research and we need to think much more carefully about whether this route provides the correct career development for scientists in the wider world.

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How Arts Students Subsidise Science

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about the madness of the current fee regime in UK higher education. Here is a quote from that piece:

To give an example, I was talking recently to a student from a Humanities department at a leading University (not my employer). Each week she gets 3 lectures and one two-hour seminar, the latter  usually run by a research student. That’s it for her contact with the department. That meagre level of contact is by no means unusual, and some universities offer even less tuition than that. A recent report states that the real cost of teaching for Law and Sociology is less than £6000 per student, consistent with the level of funding under the “old” fee regime; teaching in STEM disciplines on the other hand actually costs over £11k. What this means, in effect, is that Arts and Humanities students are cross-subsidising STEM students. That’s neither fair nor transparent.

Now here’s a nice graphic from the Times Higher that demonstrates the extent to which Science students are getting a much better deal than those in the Arts and Humanities.

The problem with charging fees relating to the real cost of studying the subject concerned is that it will deter students from doing STEM disciplines and cause even greater numbers to flock into cheaper subjects (which where much of the growth in the HE sector over the last decade has actually taken place in any case). However, the diagram shows how absurd the current system (of equal fee regardless of subject really is), and it’s actually quite amazing that more Arts students haven’t twigged what is going on. The point is that they are (unwittingly) subsidising their colleagues in STEM subjects. I think it would be much fairer if that subsidy were provided directly from the taxpayer via HEFCE otherwise there’s a clear incentive for universities to rake in cash from students on courses that are cheap to teach, rather than to provide a proper range of courses across the entire curriculum. Where’s the incentive to bother teaching, e.g., Physics at all in the current system?

I re-iterate my argument from a few weeks ago that the Labour Party’s pledge to reduce fees to £6K across all disciplines would result in a much fairer and justifiable system, as long as there was a direct subsidy from the government to make good the shortfall (of around £6K per annum per student in Physics, for example).

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The real decline of UK research funding..

I saw a news item the other day about a report produced by the Royal Society, the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Sciences calling for a big uplift in research spending. Specifically,

A target for investment in R&D and innovation of 3% of GDP for the UK as a whole – 1% from the government and 2% from industry and charities – in line with the top 10 OECD research investors. The government currently invests 0.5% of GDP; with 1.23% from the private sector.

For reference here is the UK’s overall R&D spending as a fraction of GDP since from 2000 to 2012 as a fraction of GDP:

 

Some people felt that scientific research funding has done relatively well over the past few years in an environment of deep cuts in government funding in other areas. Iit has been protected against a steep decline in funding by a “ring fence” which has kept spending level in cash terms. Although inflation as measured by the RPI has been relatively low in recent years, the real costs of scientific research have been much faster than these measures. Here is a figure that shows the effective level of funding since the last general election that shows the danger to the UK’s research base:

As a nation we already spend far less than we should on research and development, and this figure makes it plain that we are heading in the wrong direction. It’s not just a question of government funding either. UK businesses invest far too little in developing products and services based on innovations in science and technology. Because of this historic underfunding, UK based research has evolved into a lean and efficient machine but even such a machine needs fuel to make it work and the fuel is clearly running out…

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A whole lotta cheatin’ going on? REF stats revisited

Here’s a scathing analysis of Research Excellence Framework. I don’t agree with many of the points raised and will explain why in a subsequent post (if and when I get the time), but I reblogging it here in the hope that it will provoke some comments either here or on the original post (also a wordpress site).

coasts of bohemia

 

1.

The rankings produced by Times Higher Education and others on the basis of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) have always been contentious, but accusations of universities’ gaming submissions and spinning results have been more widespread in REF2014 than any earlier RAE. Laurie Taylor’s jibe in The Poppletonian that “a grand total of 32 vice-chancellors have reportedly boasted in internal emails that their university has become a top 10 UK university based on the recent results of the REF”[1] rings true in a world in which Cardiff University can truthfully[2]claim that it “has leapt to 5th in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) based on the quality of our research, a meteoric rise” from 22nd in RAE2008. Cardiff ranks 5th among universities in the REF2014 “Table of Excellence,” which is based on the GPA of the scores assigned by the REF’s “expert panels” to the three…

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Luqman Onikosi

Yesterday my attention was drawn to the case of Luqman Onikosi, a postgraduate student at the University of Sussex, who is originally from Nigeria. Luqman has been granted temporary permission to reside in the United Kingdom based on his medical circumstances; he is suffering from Hepatitis B, for which far better treatment is available in the UK than in his home country. His immigration status is yet to be definitely resolved and in the meantime he is being treated, entirely according to established policy and practice, as an Overseas Student. He is therefore  liable to pay full Overseas Fees if he is to continue on his course, an MA in Global Political Economy, and currently can not afford to pay them.

It would be inappropriate for me to comment in further detail on Luqman’s case – not least because I don’t have much in the way of further detail to comment on – but I am happy to use the medium of this personal blog to draw the attention of readers to a crowdsourcing appeal that has started with the aim of collecting sufficient funds to enable him to continue his studies. You can find the website where you can find more information about the issues surrounding his case, and instructions on how to make a donation, here.

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Higher Education Funding: A Modest Proposal

With next year’s general election already looming there are signs that the higher education funding system is likely to be a hot topic. The Conservatives, for example, are reportedly considering removing the cap on tuition fees (currently set at £9K per annum) while Labour is talking about reducing the figure to £6K. Labour’s idea is likely to prove popular among potential students, it will result in a reduction of fee income to English universities of a third, potentially leading to wholesale redundancies and closures unless it is offset by an increased contribution from the taxpayer to offset this cut. Responsibility for higher education funding in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is devolved, so Westminster policy does not apply directly there although the knock-on effect of changes in England would be considerable given the number of students who choose to study away from home.

The backdrop to these suggested policy changes is the obvious fact that the current system is unsustainable. Although there has not been a marked reduction in numbers of students applying to university since the introduction of tuition fees, it has become increasingly clear that the system of loans and deferred fees is actually costing the Exchequer more in terms of short-term borrowing than the old system. Moreover, there is a growing realization that the fraction of this cost that will actually be recouped in future is going to be much smaller than its advocates would like to admit. Recent estimates, likely to be revised upwards, suggest that 45% of student loans will never be repaid.

On top of this there is the problem that the so-called “elite” universities have not succeeded in “widening participation” (as the phrase goes). Oxford and Cambridge both continue to take about 40% of their pupils from private schools; many other institutions. My own institution, the University of Sussex, takes about 86% of its intake from state schools, which is about the average across the sector.

Although only a small fraction of pupils (about 7%) attend (private) independent schools, about 65% of those go on to University; only 24% from the state sector do. In my opinion, not all universities take widening participation seriously but even if they do (like we do at Sussex) it is difficult for higher education institutions to repair the divisions that arise much earlier in the education system.

The average fee per term for a day pupil at a private school in the UK is about £3400; this rises to about £7800 per term for boarding schools. Since there are three school terms per year this means that the average cost per year for day pupils is £10,200, well above the £9000 per year maximum fee for university tuition. That says a lot for how poorly funded UK universities really are, even with increased tuition fees, especially in STEM subjects which require expensive laboratories and other facilities. Moreover, private school fees are payable upfront while tuition fees for students in higher education are funded by heavily subsidized loans which do not need to be repaid until the student is earning more than a certain minimum salary (currently £21K pa).

When funding is tight it is particularly important that it should be targetted where it is needed most. For me that means to encourage more students from state schools to go to university. The principle I’d adopt here (and indeed in many other contexts) is encapsulated in the phrase “to each according to their need, from each according to their ability”.

Parents who have decided to send their offspring to private schools have, in my view, already demonstrated that they can afford to contribute to their education at a level considerably higher than the current tuition fee for university students. In such cases there is no need for a means test to determine whether they need support from the taxpayer; they have already done that calculation for themselves.

My proposal, therefore, is that students whose parents have decided to take their children out of the state school system should be deemed to be ineligible for state support for higher education. They should therefore pay the full fees upfront. I think there’s a case even for making such students pay for the full cost of their education which is not the £9K fee payable by Home/EU but the much higher fee charged to students from outside the EU, which is currently £17K at the University of Sussex. The money saved in this way should be used to provide better fee waivers and and maintenance grants for students from the state school system (on a means-tested basis). This could be accomplished by, e.g., a system of vouchers available to students from state schools in England; the rest of the UK could adopt a similar system if they wish. This would also be a step towards reducing the incentive for families to increase social divisions by taking their children out of the state system.

As well as driving greater equality and stimulating social mobility, my suggestion would also correct a number of anomalies in the existing system. One is that students attending English universities who went to Schools elsewhere in Europe (including Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) are entitled to the same financial support as English students. However, most students from outside the UK will return home after graduation and there is no effective means of making them pay back their fees and loans because these are currently recovered through the UK tax system. In effect, therefore, the taxpayer is providing free higher education for these students and it is one of the reason why the default rate on student loans is likely to be very high. In my proposal this loophole would be sealed; unless a student went to an English state school they would not have the means to access HEFCE support.

I have heard it said that this idea would remove choice. I don’t agree. Parents will still have the choice of sending their sons and daughters to private school if they wish. What it will do is remove part of the incentive for them to do that.

Across the UK over 80% of university students are from state schools, so the measure I suggest will not on its own solve the University funding crisis. On the other hand, I think it would at least be fairer than the current system. On the other hand, I’m not sure fairness counts for very much these days…

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