Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent)

The Bill deals with the formation of the new body, the qualification and quality assurance authority of Ireland. I broadly welcome the initiative, which seems a useful tidying up and consolidation exercise.

Part of the new authority's remit is to manage the national framework qualifications. This is important work domestically and internationally in terms of our educational system. The second remit of the authority, on which I would like to focus, is to oversee the quality assurance procedures of our universities, and how it oversees, implements, watches and approves those procedures will be very important. I would also like to focus on what else will have to happen as well as those quality assurance procedures in order to reverse the crisis in which our universities find themselves. It is fair to say the universities in Ireland today are in a very serious crisis. The Times higher education rankings for this year show that both UCD and Trinity College, Dublin fell out of the top 100 in the world, UCC and NUI Galway fell out of the top 300 and DCU and DIT fell out of the top 400.

I was speaking about the quality of graduates with the head of human resources for a US multinational which has multiple sites around the country. He told me that, ten years ago, Irish graduates around Europe and the US were seen as premium graduates who were actively sought after. However, he said that, year on year over the past decade, the Government, the universities and the Department of Education and Skills have essentially been failing our graduates because the quality of those graduates has been getting lower and lower, at least as it has been perceived by the people who have had to hire them in those ten years. He said that Irish graduates are in no way seen as premium graduates around Europe or in the US or other parts of the world; instead, they are viewed as absolutely average. This is a huge problem.

He further said that the quality of graduates he needs is becoming so low that "they are becoming unemployable" for what his multinational needs. That is very serious. We can debate whether it is true but that does not really matter. For the graduates, what matters is that the employers are saying that and are telling Members of Dáil Éireann this is how serious the crisis is. He said that at master's and PhD level they do not even try to hire in Ireland any longer. There are positions in Ireland but, to fill them, they do not even advertise in Ireland any longer and only go abroad. He said that the quality of our postgraduates - our master's and PhD students - has become so low compared to Europe and the US that they simply do not bother hiring here any longer.

We have to become very aware of the scale of the crisis we are facing and of the role this new authority can, I hope, play. Why is this happening? It is happening partly because the leaving certificate students the universities are getting are also falling in quality. The PISA report some 18 months ago showed that our secondary schools have had the greatest fall in educational standards in the developed world both in relative and absolute terms. It is not just that others are getting better quicker than we are. In a decade when we doubled the per capita investment in education, we had the single biggest fall in educational standards in the developed world. The universities are getting secondary school graduates who simply are not as well educated as they were five or ten years ago, and this is a big problem for them.

The second problem is what is going on in the universities themselves. There are three issues on which I would like to focus, the first of which is money. World class education costs money. Budget 2012 has a 6% cumulative drop in funding to universities between this year and 2015. If we factor in 2% inflation per year in each of those years, that is an extra 8%, so we get to a real cut in funding for our universities in the next four years of 14%. It gets much worse. At the same time, student numbers in the universities are projected to increase by 18%, so they are being asked to educate a lot more students with a lot less money. The per student funding will drop between now and 2015 by just under 30%.

Things are getting bad very quickly. If we are to take an extra 30% per student away from our universities, they will continue to get much, much worse. This is extraordinarily serious. Of course, this means class sizes increase, research posts disappear and teaching supports evaporate. What happens? Our universities do less and less well, international academic staff and international students are not interested in coming here any longer, we do not get the prestige, expertise and money from international students, the money dries up further and it becomes a vicious circle. We are in a very serious situation.

The second reason I put to the Minister is that the Government is refusing to set a bold, ambitious target for our universities. I raised the issue of falling standards with the Minister of State, Deputy Cannon, in October. He came back with a bunch of statistics which suggested that if we think about it another way, we are doing just fine. That is very worrying. He would not accept the scale of the crisis whatsoever. When I asked what ideas the Government was possibly taking from the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League universities in the US, the Minister of State, Deputy Cannon, said he considered those universities to be "incredibly elitist". Therefore, not only are we not aspiring to have some of the best universities in the world, in Dáil Éireann one of the Ministers of State with responsibility for education is actively turning up his nose at the best universities in the world. Again, this is deeply worrying.

The third reason is that the universities here are not implementing management practices which we know some of the best universities in the world use at student level, graduate level and at the level of academic and professional staff. I believe this is because both academic and non-academic management within the universities have huge constraints in terms of what they are actually allowed do.

What can be done? I would like to address those three reasons. As the Minister knows, the Hunt report recommended an extra-----

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