Dr. Greg Foley:

I have a document here and I will send it to members. I have 15 suggestions but I will speak about two. First, and this may be boring, we need a rolling capital investment plan for the STEM disciplines. If we do not have that, all the talk about a knowledge economy is nonsense. Second, this will sound funny coming from an engineer working in a so-called STEM area, I have spoken to career guidance teachers about this and I am aware that secondary school leavers feel badgered into doing STEM courses. It is coding, coding and more coding. Having done coding, these disciplines are real minority tastes and do not appeal to everybody. If one considers what the best-performing students in our universities are studying, it is often the humanities at which they excel. I worry that, as a country, we are becoming obsessed with STEM. It is such a broad term and people are studying biology, physics, coding and they are all different. What I would love the Minister to do is to set up a working group in which he talks to recently qualified graduates who have made the transition from B.Sc or PhD into the workplace. Nobody over 35 years should be invited. If one talks to recently qualified PhD students in the STEM area, they will give one a very different perspective from the spin about the knowledge economy. That is trickling down to school leavers. I have one career guidance teacher from Scoil Chaitríona in Glasnevin who tells me that her students feel they have to do maths because of STEM. They feel the economy will fall apart if they do not study STEM subjects. I would like to get a really good sense of what the economy needs. Do we all have to be fantastic at maths? I am not too sure we really do. Engineers use maths.