Professor Frank Monahan:

It actually has not changed very much, to be honest. I say this because what we find is that to bring in enough funding for the school, and the university generally, we must recruit more students. Doing this does not help our ratio. This is a challenge we have. I spoke to the UCD bursar just yesterday about the actual cost of educating a graduate, which is about €12,000 annually, while we receive about €8,500 in funding. This is what the students pay and what we get from the Government. There is, therefore, a shortfall, and this means we keep taking in more students to pay the bills, as it were, and this then negatively impacts our student-staff ratio. It definitely does not help it. This is where we are now.