Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister indicated in his reply, we need to be cautious about the different university rankings. Two have been published in recent weeks, the Times Higher Education survey and the QS world university rankings. One had some universities going up and the other had the same universities going down. Trinity College is a case in point.

The Minister pointed out the fact that we are in the top 200 and stated that for a country size our size this was positive by comparison with some of our European neighbours. Spain stands out in particular in the recent results because it has only one university in that bracket and the size of its population is very different from ours. The key point, however, is that we must watch out for is what is happening within our universities. We need to take measurements ourselves in terms of how the quality of our third level education is improving or otherwise.

Recent years have seen spending cut radically to universities at a time when the student intake in many universities has increased by 15% to 20%. If the Minister talks to anyone in the third level sector he will hear how that has been impacting on the quality of education and the service it is providing.

Will the Minister indicate overall where he is taking our third level sector, especially our universities and institutes of technology? There seems to be a sense of drift. Initially the Minister was going to reduce the student registration fee. He has increased that in terms of funding them and there is no bigger vision in terms of how he can ensure quality is not eroded. The fact that we have two in the top 200 is welcome but it will take serious effort to ensure that we keep the quality up.

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