The sting of Irish colleges’ mediocrity

IT could be a problem.” Dropbox’s chief operating officer (COO) was talking about Irish universities’ relative slippage in standards. If you missed it, Irish universities have fallen down the international rankings almost every year for the past eight years.

Only one of the three most-quoted rankings bodies has any Irish college – TCD – in its top 100. And at 98, it has plummeted compared to its 47 th ranking just a few years ago. (Another of the top three rankings has TCD at 224th.)

Aside from funding cuts that mean decaying campuses, the State won’t let our main colleges pay competitive salaries or raise realistic fees from students. That can lead to some second-rate lecturers and researchers compared to elite rival institutions in other countries. That, in turn, can lead to less talented students from abroad. And that, in the long run, may lead to less interest from tech, science and pharmaceutical companies in setting up higher-end research facilities in Ireland.

Take a walk around an Irish university’s facilities and you’ll see what I mean. Some, such as Trinity, UCC and UCG, have pretty buildings and communal squares on site. But many parts of these campuses are drab or decaying. Audio-visual and IT equipment provided is often secondrate. Research labs are frequently basic. UCD’s head of mechanical engineering Michael Gilchrist recently told an Oireachtas committee that some class experiments had to be repeated five times with students because of only one set of test equipment.

Whatever about grateful Irish students attending their local facility at a cut-price rate, little of this impresses highpaying foreign students. American students, in particular, don’t have an appreciation for shabby chic over cuttingedge apparatus. And they like to have internationally-renowned lecturers or professors who are leaders in their field, not whoever will work for the State-capped salary.

Money would sort some of these problems out. But Irish universities seem shackled compared to soaring rivals.

This is the background to what the COO of Dropbox and I were chatting about at a networking event the company held in Dublin two weeks ago.

Companies like Dropbox are eternally, irrevocably attracted to countries with good universities.

Two months ago, I interviewed Microsoft’s president Brad Smith (pictured). One of the main brakes on Microsoft pulling the plug on a post-Brexit Britain, he said, was Oxford and Cambridge. Microsoft, like so many other top companies, needs to be where the best emerging brains are.

For some reason, this basic economic dynamic isn’t appreciated by Irish policymakers or the Irish public. Or if it is, it’s wilfully subjugated to serve more immediate political goals.

Keeping fees down so that young people can qualify as basic engineers or accountants is still a far higher priority among Irish policymakers than enabling universities’ facilities to create an elite class of graduates who might build things (and, thus, employ basic engineers and accountants).

It’s a vicious circle that affects all of us in the end. It increases the likelihood of Ireland having to extend its reliance on tax breaks for multinationals to locate its customer support centres here.

Unfortunately, many policymakers don’t rate an ambitious third-level ecosystem on a par with other things. Call centre jobs are just as good as research jobs to a great many ministers, politicians and commentators. And college fees staying capped at unrealistic levels is better for shortterm political health than higher-achieving colleges and the economic halo around those.

We may as well admit that we have a cultural apathy to higher education, too.

So long as someone has a certificate – any certificate – in his or her hand, the State considers its role to be fulfilled. Many policymakers may still regard this as a huge achievement, thinking back to their own grandparents (or parents), who may not have completed second-level education.

Talk to these people about prioritising elite education systems and they’ll shake their heads.

“Elite is a dirty word here,” one university official recently told me. “It’s only really acceptable for sport.”

All of this is a touchy subject with universities and an even touchier one with policymakers. Officially, authorities point to the country’s marketing logo: Ireland is a country with “an educated young workforce”. But the next time you hear this uttered by a Government minister, IDA official or multinational vice-president, check the context in which they’re speaking. It will almost certainly be against the backdrop of an investment announcement for junior or mid-ranking jobs. Those same jobs are almost always supplicant roles for the higher-end design jobs held by the company’s main brains centre abroad. And that brains centre is usually close to some top university.

“There is a strong sense that the system is fundamentally broken,” said Ned Costello, chief executive of the Irish Universities Association. The recently-published Cassells report into education said an additional €600m – or up to €10,000 a student a year – was needed to get the third-level system back into competitive shape.

We’re now at a critical juncture in public policy on this. Do we want to settle into mid-table mediocrity for good? Or can we get over our past to compete at the top?