A NEW initiative which brings together all the main higher education colleges in Dublin was launched yesterday by Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe.
The new group could open the way for much greater mobility across the sector, with students able to attend different courses across the various colleges.
The new Dublin Region Higher Education Alliance (DRHEA) is designed to foster and deepen collaboration across the eight Dublin institutions.
The DRHEA also aims to establish Dublin as a primary destination for international students, and to help widen participation and improve access to third-level in the Dublin region.
In all the Dublin colleges account for almost 50 per cent of all undergraduate students and over 62 per cent of all PhD students in the Republic.
The colleges making up the alliance are; Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Dublin City University, NUI Maynooth, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), the Institute of Art Design and Technology, the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, and the Institute of Technology Tallaght.
The launch of the new group comes only months after a bitter dispute about the “secretive’’ moves by UCD and TCD to launch a research merger.
Several university heads – including those at UCC and DCU – were openly critical of the research merge, launched by Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
These differences were put to one side at yesterday’s event. The president of NUI Maynooth, Prof John Hughes, said: “The institutions represented by the DRHEA recognise the clear potential to transform higher education in the Dublin city region.
“Collaboration on this scale is unprecedented within Irish higher education and has few international parallels.”
The president of DIT, Prof Brian Norton, said he could see a future where there is a “seamless mobility’’ of postgraduate students across the various institutions.
According to the Higher Education Authority chairman, Michael Kelly, the alliance will boost “collaborative innovations that will significantly enhance the capacity and potential of the regional higher education system”.
In launching the Dublin Alliance, Mr O’Keeffe said that the Government has been emphasising the need for enhanced collaboration across our higher education institutions for some time now.
“Collaboration enables institutions to identify areas of expertise and to collaborate with each other to strengthen overall national performance.’’
