Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent)

The question is what can be done about the serious crisis in our third level institutions, including our universities. I put it to the Government there are some things it can do right now which will begin to address this growing crisis, and the first of these is to increase funding. The Minister will be aware of the Hunt report, which stated an extra €500 million was needed to plug the gap in college funding up to 2020. Universities themselves must get a lot better at fund-raising, and they can look to the US universities as probably the best in the world at this. The Government can play an active role in helping them to achieve this. In particular, it could provide low interest or zero interest rate loans on student fees whereby, as in models such as the UK's, these would kick in once the graduate's salary reached a certain level. It would be very important that the additional fees were ring-fenced to improve teaching quality for the students.

We can also look at recruiting more students from overseas. Some 1.3 million Chinese students attend foreign universities, with 100,000 studying in London alone last year. It is estimated each of these spends some Stg£20,000 between fees and living expenses, making it an industry worth Stg£2 billion every year. There is a huge market, if we can get the rankings of our universities high enough up the tables that they can attract foreign students.

More choices can be made in terms of diverting money to the universities. For example, a short-term increase in higher-end income tax would raise several hundred million euro which could be invested in the universities. Not paying increments would save €250 million which could be diverted to third level institutions and universities. The Government has made the choice to cut that money from our third level institutions and to pay increments at a time of national economic crisis. These are not smart choices for the future of this country or for the future of education.

It may seem a strange thing to suggest that we should invest more in the middle of an IMF mission, but I would like to draw the Government's attention to the case of Finland. In the early 1990s, Finland broke away from the Soviet Union, its major trading partner. Unemployment in Finland went up from 3% to 18% and Finland increased its investment in education and research and development. This is something we must do. We must get serious about setting a vision and some targets. We must stop massaging the data, suggesting we are doing fine. We are not doing fine. The data is unambiguous and our universities are in freefall. This is a national crisis.

We must expect more of ourselves and must expect and demand more of our educators. Other countries do this successfully. For example, Singapore has two universities in the top 100 in the world, Switzerland has three and the Netherlands has five. This can be done and is by no means beyond our ability, but we must set the vision that this is what we will achieve. Otherwise, it will not happen. We must also give universities the tools they need to transform their performance as they do not have these tools currently. A comment made by a former president of UCD comes to mind. In response to some criticism some years ago, he said: "You want me to give you a world class university, but I have to pay my best professor and my worst professor exactly the same wage. I cannot do it." A former president of DCU on the same issue said: "You want me to turn DCU into a world class university, but 80% of my spend is beyond my control. I cannot do what you want if I only control €1 in €5 that I get." We must recognise that this cannot be done unless we let these people find and hire the best staff, give them the freedom to equip those staff to teach in a world class manner and hold them accountable for what they do.

We must emphasise the teaching. Many of us know that in a significant number of third level institutions, teaching, in terms of career advancement, is not taken seriously. The advice many young staff looking for academic posts are given is to concentrate on their research, get papers out and not worry too much about the teaching because that is not what will get them posts. We must change that culture or this will not work. There is little formal feedback from students and they do not really have a voice. Someone could be teaching rubbish year after year and although all the students are aware of that, they have no voice. They have no ability to feed into the system and suggest that this person should not be teaching them. It would be interesting to discover how many teaching staff in our third level institutions have been removed from their posts over the past five years for bad quality teaching. It would also be interesting to discover how many had been promoted for providing excellent teaching. I suspect the numbers would be very close to zero.

In summary, the crisis of falling standards in our schools, third level institutions and universities is as important as the debt, banking and economic crises. If we do not sort this crisis, it will be as big a medium to long-term problem as the economic crisis is in the short term. We have an opportunity to act and the Government can make some choices. It can reverse the cuts. Finland did it in the 1990s and we can do it. The tough decisions should be made. We can and should set bold and ambitious targets and the management teams must be given the tools they need to help them change the culture, get the best people, support them and hold them accountable. If we do that, we can begin to turn the situation around. The new qualification and quality assurance authority is a first step, but the Government must go much further.

See this speech in context