UNIVERSITY ACADEMICS are increasingly concerned about the performance of some Leaving Cert students who are “spoon-fed” in school and expect the same in college, the chief executive of the Higher Education Authority, Tom Boland said yesterday.
In a key address, he also pointed to increasing evidence that the quality and employability of Irish graduates was declining, when compared to other developed states.
Mr Boland said he was hearing “increasing unease” among academics about the dominance of rote learning in the Leaving Cert exams and the lack of independent learning. Greater coherence was required, he said, between the second- and third-level systems.
“Increasingly, I am hearing alarm at the extent to which our second-level system is producing students who learn to the test; who in ever greater numbers are not learning to think for themselves; who receive spoon-feeding at second level and expect the same at third.
“I have a concern that, in response, too many of our academic departments at third level are responding to this learned behaviour, not by challenging it but by collaborating in it, even to the extent of worrying grade inflation. We need to seriously re-imagine key levels of our second-level system.”
He pointed to the new revamped, more practical maths course – Project Maths – as a model of what needs to be done in a much broader and deeper way.
Speaking at a DIT conference on education rankings, he also cited mounting evidence – much of it anecdotal in higher education circles – that Ireland is “falling behind in quality . . . our graduates are not always the first choice of employers and our famed flexibility and intellectual nimbleness is disappearing”.
He also made the case for radical transformation of the higher education sector in which college income is linked to national economic priorities.
Mr Boland said the era of light-touch regulation by government of higher education was drawing to a close. This approach, he said, has “given us unnecessary and inefficient duplication in programme provision. It has given us mission creep, inflexible staffing structures and practices and it has given us a fragmented system of institutions which to a very great extent stand apart and aloof from each other.”
This, he said, cannot continue. “We cannot afford this mode of operation and organisation anymore. We cannot afford the cost and we cannot afford the implications for quality. Higher education costs in the order of €2 billion annually, most of it public money.”
Mr Boland said recurrent funding has to be made contingent, at least in part, on the demonstration of performance by institutions that are consistent with their institutional missions and with the broader national objectives for higher education. “We must focus much more on outputs from the system, rather than inputs,” he said.
Rather than chasing world rankings, he said, “we need to transform Irish higher education from a set of institutions operating in isolation into a coherent, well co-ordinated system of higher education and research, where quality outcomes are the paramount pre-occupation and shrewd use of resources a key factor in success in contributing to national goals. Collectively, our higher education institutions represent a very valuable national resource and it is imperative for Ireland’s economic and social development that its full potential, across all institutions of all types, be realised.”
The system’s development, said Mr Boland, requires a greater emphasis on collaboration and consolidation so that “we can harness national expertise in particular disciplines and build up the capacity and quality of the entire higher education system”.
In this way that the system can develop the “critical mass, the concentration of expertise and the shrewd use of resources necessary to succeed domestically and internationally,” he said.
