Teaching Matters: We now seem to have consensus that our third-level education has to raise its game if it is to underpin the Government's aspiration to make Ireland a leader in the emerging knowledge-based economy.

Our existing system, which contributed hugely to the Celtic Tiger, can simply not provide the means for us to compete effectively in the future.

What there is less consensus about, as yet, is how we should go about making the change - or even what we should be aiming for. Much recent debate has circled around the notion of "world-class universities", with some expressing the ambition for Ireland to join that exclusive league.

There are different ways of ranking universities, none without controversy as to their methodology. But no matter how one assesses it, what is certain is that none of Ireland's seven universities qualifies as world-class. This is merely a statement of fact, not a criticism of any university or of our many excellent academics.

The real questions we have to ask do not include whether we should have one or more world-class universities. Let us glance at why I believe Ireland can never hope to join this league.

First, population size. The US has perhaps 25 world-class universities - one per 10 million people. The Chinese have declared that they wish to develop 150 such universities - about the same ratio of 10 million people per world-class university. In the UK there are perhaps five universities that qualify - or 12 million people to one. The conclusion for Ireland with our population of four million is pretty obvious.

An even bigger obstacle is the issue of resources. The Higher Education Authority (HEA) annual grant to Irish universities is no more than €700 million, to support 80,000 students. Student-staff ratios are typically more than 20 to 1. Total Government support is under €10,000 per student.

Consider by comparison the resources of some existing world-class universities: Stanford University has fewer than 15,000 enrolled students, a student to staff ratio of 7 to 1 and an annual budget of $2.6 billion. Support per head is around €170,000. MIT with its 14,500 students has an annual budget of $1.8 billion - support per head of around €120,000. University of Chicago has a budget of $1.2 billion and student numbers of 14,000. Support per head is around €85,000. Princeton has a student to staff ratio of 5 to 1, student numbers are 7,000 and its budget is $920m. Support per head is around €130,000.

In the UK, Cambridge and Oxford have annual expenditures of £500 million for student numbers of 17,500. Support per head is around €40,000.

So to get into this world-class league at all, we would have to increase support of our universities by between four and 14 times.

It requires no great insight to see that an increase like that is simply not on. An economic case could maybe be put forward, but there is no evidence whatever that there is either political support or public demand to make it happen.

Perhaps, if we cannot afford a world-class university, we might be able to have a world-class system. But what does that mean? How to define it, accept its implications and implement the consequences?

It seems to me that the first question that needs asking is what do we want from our university system. Perhaps we need to ask what are the things which we wish to be world class at - and also what that means. I believe we have a system-wide challenge which we are failing to respond to. Neither the Government, nor the HEA nor the universities have been prepared to face this issue, notwithstanding the recent creation of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the positive consequences for R&D in Ireland that have flowed from those decisions.

We need a strategic plan for the national system of universities - much as the OECD suggested: "There should be a national council for tertiary education, research and innovation to be chaired by the Taoiseach, which would bring together the relevant government departments with an interest or involvement in tertiary education to determine a rolling national strategic agenda for tertiary education and its relation to innovation, skilled labour force and the economy."

I suspect that if we did this the outcome would neither be the status quo, nor would it focus on creating world-class universities. Inevitably, each university would have to focus on a narrower set of activities within the framework of a national strategic plan, while rationalisation and inter-university cooperation would feature strongly.

This would demand sacrifices and cause pain in each university. But if we do not take these hard decisions, universities will fail in their duty to assist the nation. The focus to date in the debate about the future has been on what Government must do for the universities, without perhaps enough attention paid to asking what the university system is prepared to do for itself.

Ireland has taken such a leap before. To create the Celtic Tiger, we devised an economic development strategy which became the envy of most countries, both small and large, and is being adopted by many of them. If we put our minds to it we could surely devise an approach that would be equally innovative in addressing the task of how a small player can aspire to a leadership position in the knowledge-based economy.

• Danny O'Hare is a past president of Dublin City University