Professor Michael Gilchrist:

UCD attracts the largest cohort of engineering students entering Ireland’s third level sector. Our courses require the highest CAO points of all engineering courses nationally. I speak today from my experience as head of the UCD school of mechanical and materials engineering. In doing so, I point to the key areas where additional resources would be applied if the Cassells report's proposals on funding were implemented.

Student numbers entering first year engineering have risen by 20% in the past ten years, from 250 to 300 per annum. These extra students include EU and non-EU students. We need to provide additional supports for these students because of the wider spread of mathematics ability across this wider student cohort coming from the leaving certificate, and to support our non-EU and mature students. Budgets for these supports were used previously for small group learning opportunities for our students via teaching assistants, tutorials and laboratory attendants. Taught masters student numbers have also increased dramatically. Ten years ago, my own school delivered only one taught masters programme to complement our honours BE degree in mechanical engineering; we now lead nine such programmes. This welcome growth has been largely in response to market needs in key industry sectors, including energy and biomedical engineering, but it led directly to my student-staff ratio exceeding 27:1 two years ago.

The FTE student cohort across our five engineering schools has increased by more than 35% since 2008. A key challenge for staff on our taught programmes is to provide good student feedback and to have small-group interactions with students. This can only be done with adequate student-staff ratios. International comparators indicate ratios of less than 15:1 in leading engineering schools, and less than 10:1 in the world’s top ranked universities.

A constant concern that we face is how to ensure that the quality of education provided to our students does not diminish. Two issues make this increasingly difficult to achieve, despite the constant use of newer technologies. We have fewer postgraduate research students. These people largely deliver the supports I mentioned earlier. Academics have increasingly less time or capacity to carry out research with PhD students and post-docs and to seek the competitive funding that supports them. Within my own engineering school, we previously budgeted approximately €100,000 per annum to pay these as teaching assistants. It is almost ten years since our budget permitted this.

The lack of adequate space is an acute problem. In my own school, the dramatic growth in our taught student numbers has meant that rooms and laboratory spaces that were previously available for students for project work are almost in constant use for classroom and teaching purposes. Effectively, our students now have no dedicated space available to them for project work in our computer rooms, our workshops or our laboratories.

When I joined UCD, there were eight full-time technicians in our workshop. Last year, we had only two full-time technicians here. A key requirement underpinning the quality of our engineering programmes is the workshop, laboratory and hands-on project support that technicians provide as a major part of all students' training. The vast majority of the laboratory teaching equipment in my school is at the limit of its useful service life and its residual value has depreciated to zero. In the past five years, since I have been head of school, we have only spent approximately €50,000 to either repair or replace such equipment. Putting this figure in context, less than 0.5% of my annual operating budget is available for this.

Engineering at UCD is very ambitious for its research and innovation activities. The relationship between these and our teaching and learning activities is deeply intertwined, impacting positively on the experience our undergraduate students have when they work on cutting-edge topics with our research students. We have a diverse research income stream, with 40% coming from Science Foundation Ireland, including direct funding for two research professors in the areas of precision manufacturing and the Internet of things. The EU provides one quarter of our research funding and we are home to five ERC awardees. Industry provides a similar level of funding for research equipment and for people. However, the key factor that is beginning to limit our ambitions and future successes is the availability of suitable laboratory and office space to carry out engineering research.

In the last decade, there have been nine spin-out companies from UCD engineering, including OxyMem, which develops novel wastewater treatments and is the only Irish Global Cleantech 100 company; APC, which employs 60 people and is recruiting a further 100 for its Cherrywood premises; and BiancaMed, now part of ResMed, which specialises in non-contact sleep monitoring equipment and is based at NexusUCD.

In summary, it is talent and innovation that will be key to developing Ireland's future indigenous industries and sustaining manufacturing multinational companies here. Education and research are fundamental to this. We simply must address the gaps in our higher education system as it is the foundation of our future economic growth and a vibrant society.