Recently we have seen major changes in the role of higher education in society throughout the world. Once the domain of the intellectual elite, the modern university now seems to be abandoning its traditional role of education in favour of providing the industrial skills necessary for the development of national economies.

In varying degrees throughout the world, the market is dictating the curriculum development, and students are voting with their feet and forsaking the traditional disciplines in favour of skills orientated courses.

There can be no doubt that the role of the university has changed utterly from its origins. Thus the vital role the university had in the formation of the cultural and spiritual values of our world has been diminished or lost in a headlong stampede towards vocationalism in the new higher education ethos.

The idea of Cardinal John Henry Newman in his On the Scope & Nature of University Education, written when he was Rector of the Catholic University in Newman House, Dublin, in 1856, "that the true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a university is not learning or acquirement, but rather is thought or reason exercised upon knowledge, or what may be called philosophy" may still have some followers in academe, but they are being overwhelmed by the demands for relevance to the national economic development strategy.

It is a rapidly changing scene whereby the more traditional universities, however reluctantly, are gradually dismantling their ivory towers while the newer, more vocational, institutions seek academic recognition and acceptance in the established university world.

And it is a turbulent scene, where the changes are driven by the huge increases in student numbers in most countries since the middle of the last century. The universities, with their vital output of graduates, have become the power houses of industrial development, and in Ireland as elsewhere appear to be doing this successfully.

The participation rate in higher education in terms of the percentage of the 18year-old age cohort has moved from the "elite" phase of less than 5 per cent in the 1950s to the "mass" phase 30 per cent to 50 per cent of recent times. It appears to be continuing onwards to the "universal" phase of 50 per cent plus.

Thus third-level education, with its emphasis now unashamedly on vocationalism, is lining up in direct succession to primary and secondary level education as the normal and expected route for young people today.

A particular feature of this is the effect it is having on the range of courses offered. Academic genetics are such that university disciplines keep subdividing into smaller units, and some of these units develop further to become fully fledged disciplines with courses offered as part of the regular university calendar.

Thus there are now over 40 types of engineering degrees where 100 years ago there were only two, civil and military. In general, with some notable exceptions such as Women Studies, which met with fierce opposition, the university world has been quite liberal in accepting academic innovations.

With the extraordinary growth in research, it is not surprising that ambitious and successful academics will, together with their many international collaborators, stake out their own domain, making claims as to its vital importance.

In particular, the great commercial successes of interdisciplinary research across the spectra of science, engineering and medical disciplines have been a vital part of the growth pattern, where their contributions to our living standards and comforts have been enormous.

The situation is changing, fuelled in the main by student numbers voting with their feet as well as their brains, so that many in the university world now view the proliferation of new degrees as a forest fire out of control.

Whereas in earlier times US universities were derided in Europe for accrediting such "funny" topics as Dance, Mortuary Sciences or Nursing Studies, now universally accepted, the European universities were staid and staunchly conservative in their attitude to curricula development.

STRANGELY it is the UK, once the most conservative of all higher education scenes, which is leading the charge in innovative curricula changes. It is reported that there are over 40,000 third-level courses on offer in the UK. Degrees in Surfing, Knitting and Golf Course Management are on offer alongside the traditional options such as Law, Medicine, English Literature etc. One can even take a course on David Beckham.

Critics of such developments are appalled at these new courses, describing them as quasi-academic and vacuous, claiming that they are bolstered in absurd ways with academic padding so as to stretch them artificially over four-year degree programmes.

Conversely, critics of these critics call them academic snobs, intellectual dinosaurs out of tune with the demands of students and the industrial marketplace. Indeed it would seem there is some evidence to support the view that the marketplace has taken over the curriculum development strategy and that the traditional academics, with their floppy caps, colourful gowns and Socratic ethos, have been consigned to the dusty archives of academic history.

John Kelly is emeritus professor, and a former registrar, at University College Dublin