Diversity of Learners and Providers
New Providers - Changing Roles for Teachers
Higher Education and a Civil Society
I would like to look at the factors which we might reasonably project as likely to influence the development of the third level system and to hazard some guesses as to how the system will respond or evolve. Important influences include economic and social policy, the impact of technological developments, the increasingly important role of research in our third level system and the influence of policy issues such as equality and quality.
The main policy preoccupation influencing the development of third level education in the last 30 years was to increase the number of undergraduate places. This was driven by the need to meet the demand from the growing numbers of school leavers, and the policy objective of increasing the participation rate in third level education.
These, in turn, were driven by the following considerations.
The first was to increase the numbers graduating from third level with degrees, diplomas and certificates in order to meet the emerging needs of the economy, following the shift in industrial policy which began in the late 1950s with the gradual dismantling of protection which led ultimately to our membership of the European Union.
The second important pressure was social demand. Patrick Hillery and Donagh O'Malley gave expression to the pent up demand for access to second level education - where we had significantly lagged behind the rest of Western Europe and the OECD. This was followed by expansion at third level, the creation of new places in the universities, the establishment of the two new National Institutes for Higher Education, later to become Dublin City University and the University of Limerick, and the founding of a network of Regional Technical Colleges, later to become the Institutes of Technology, across the country.
By any standard as we can see from Figures 1 and 2 this policy has been a resounding success. One result is that Ireland, a country with low levels of educational attainment a generation ago, now ranks reasonably well in the international league tables (see Figure 3).
FIGURE 1 and FIGURE 2
FIGURE 3
Ratio of tertiary graduates to population at the typical age of graduation (1996) (short and long first university degree programmes)
Group 1 : Australia, US, UK, Canada, New Zealand 30%+
Group 2 : Denmark, Norway, Spain, Korea, Ireland Finland, Japan, Hungary, Netherlands 20% - 28%
Group 3 : Sweden, Belgium(FI), Portugal, Iceland, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Austria 10% - 19%
Source OECD, Education at a Glance 1998We mightn't have realised it at the time but policy implementation was in retrospect rather straightforward and focused!
Some of the implications of these changes are set out in a recent review of the demand for third level places, which was carried out on behalf of the HEA and the Government by a committee chaired by Dr. Donal de Buitléir. This committee concluded that the approximately 114,000 places which are now planned in the third level system should by and large be adequate to meet the demand from school leavers. The committee was careful nevertheless to emphasise that this conclusion should be kept under close review and that, in particular, regard should be had to the trend in third level participation rates in competitor countries. The clear implication is that if other countries ratchet up participation, so should we. Interesting policy challenges arise from other important groups, particularly mature students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
However, it won't be all plain sailing even for school leavers. We cannot be at all certain that the trends which have established themselves in the past will continue effortlessly. Success creates new challenges. Labour market opportunities for young people have improved enormously. There is an increasing concern that, particularly among the less well off, the attractions of immediate employment outweigh those of the benefits which would result from longer term investment in education. The Annual School Leavers Report for 1998 published by the ESRI showed that the proportion of school leavers advancing to other education opportunities had declined.
The diversity of learners will spring from a range of needs. The demographic profile is changing. There will be very powerful social demands for improved equality and access and a growing appreciation of the role of third level education for personal development. Side by side with this there are likely to be powerful economic pressures which will pull in two directions. On the one hand if the economy continues to expand there will be the continuing need to increase skill and education attainment levels in the population and to maximise the potential of our labour force and, on the other, as we have seen, continued economic prosperity may perversely attract people away from education.
Since the early 80s Professor Pat Clancy has been tracking the performance of the different socio-economic groups at third level. This analysis is summarised in Figure 5. As we can see there are quite significant differences between the participation rates for the various social groups. OECD projections suggest that, despite the considerable improvements that have taken place in increasing access to third level, by 2015 (admittedly on the basis of the very rigid assumption of freezing graduation and participation rates at their current level) the human capital endowments of Ireland would still be below those of other OECD countries (see Figure 6). These data illustrate the point that there is both an economic and a social need for improving access and increasing the skills and capacities of our labour force.
Access, I would argue, is at the centre of both economic policy and social policy and is not a residual policy issue to be dealt with in, letÕs say, the good times or when we have dealt with other issues.
The HEA has statutory responsibilities in the equality area. In order to help us and to help the system implement and fulfil those obligations we commissioned Professor Malcolm Skilbeck, formerly of the OECD and formerly Vice-Chancellor of Deaken University in Australia, to survey the international position in respect of equality policies. Those of you who know Malcolm well will know that he will always produce a very elegant and a very carefully written report. That is what he has done. There is no magic bullet for access policies. However, there are some basic principles we can set down. These are shown in Figure 7. Nobody escapes scrutiny. Everybody has their task to do.
Source: Fig 6 - OECD Education at a Glance, 1997
Projections assume current "graduation" rates i.e... current completion rates
Skilbeck and Connell, "Meeting the Equity Challenge in Higher Education;
A Review of International Experience", HEA, May 2000
What has the HEA been doing? We have in this regard been funding specific access initiatives in the universities since the 1990s2. Professor Bob Osborne and Helen Leith from the University of Ulster and Queen's University Belfast have completed an evaluation of these initiatives. We will also be publishing a report on non-completion, which is a very important aspect of access, and we are working with AHEAD in relation to access by people with disabilities. We intend in the Autumn to host a major forum on equality issues3 and six months after the forum we will begin the statutory review provided for in the Universities Act of the equality policies of the universities.
Mature students will become an increasingly important group in third level education and this has interesting implications for provision. The recent de BuitlŽir review of the demand for post-secondary level provision drew particular attention to the fact that mature student participation in third level education was well below what might be regarded as an appropriate strategic objective. The committee concluded that there was a potentially significant demand for third level education from mature students. The watchword here for the future will be flexible provision. The HEA is now commissioning market research on the demand for third level education from potential mature students and indeed will be encouraging the education institutions to commission further market research to explore the most effective ways of reaching this very important target group.
Mature and part-time students are not a homogeneous category. They include students and learners involved in second-chance or Òcatch-up" education as well as individuals who have already secured third level qualifications and who are taking further courses either for professional reasons or for personal development. These groups start off from different positions. They have different requirements and face different constraints but they share one common feature. Their needs will not be addressed efficiently by an inflexible model of day-time teaching based on the traditional academic year.
The traditional archetype of the third level student, on which teaching structures, timetables and funding models have been based, has been that of a school leaver, studying full time. We can see that these students will increasingly in the future be sharing the attentions of educators with other types of students. Some observers are now asking the question if the archetype is outdated even for the so-called full-time students? Many of them spend a considerable amount of time doing paid work. This can be, but is not always, because of pressing economic need. Sometimes the income from work goes to fund expensive social lives. Perhaps the boundaries between full-time and part-time are blurring? Should funding, course structures and teaching models take account of this?
Diversity of provision is the other side of the coin. New "suppliers" are entering the market. The UK Open University already has a significant number of students in the Republic and other international providers are likely to make their presence felt. The Irish third level institutions have been co-operating through the distance education centre, Oscail, which has nearly 3,000 registered students. An interesting question is whether we can now see a convergence between the technological possibilities for delivering education in much more flexible ways and the diverse needs of learners? I suggest that the answer is yes. What possibilities emerge from this? Will, for example, our own education institutions be involved increasingly in franchising courses over the internet to other providers and will they themselves be receiving and taking in franchised courses from other institutions? Could for example, a business school - let us take the Smurfit School in UCD for example - buy packages over the NET from - say Harvard or Stanford, rather than addressing particular aspects of provision itself and could it, in turn, sell its output to other institutions? We're looking at a market place, and it will be a market place of increasing competition. In market places there are winners and there are losers.
The electronic capacity for education provision through such means as the Internet and interactive television now offers the potential for flexible and individualised delivery of content to learners. This of course offers the possibility for much greater efficiency and for allowing education to be combined with other activities particularly employment. An interesting opportunity emerging from this is that the teacher and lecturer of the future may be much less a person who delivers content and acts as a knowledge resource for his or her students, and more a guide and a mentor. Perhaps it might not be too fanciful to speculate that the new technologies will open up to a much wider number of people, the tutorial model of higher education which was previously available only to a very small and elite group of students?
Does that change the role of the teacher? Many of us remember our inspiring teachers. Do we remember them because they were good at content delivery or do we remember them because of other characteristics? I suspect we remember them because of the inspiration they gave us.
Certification is a central issue in third level education. Although some progress has been made we don't yet have a flexible certification structure in place in this country which allows for efficient progress through various levels of achievement and certification. An ideal certification structure is one which is systematic, transparent, and unambiguous. It should offer clear pathways, ladders and linkages from very basic levels of qualification right up to qualifications at doctorate level. Students (or learners as they should perhaps more correctly be described) should have easy access to the possibilities for progression. At the moment the structure is patchy. How easy is it, for example, for a graduate of an Institute of Technology with an engineering diploma to progress to degree level (see Figure 8)? The sense I have is that the individuals involved could in some instances find the journey confusing, time consuming and difficult. This and other issues will be tackled over the next number of years by the recently established National Qualifications Authority in co-operation with the HEA and third level institutions. The HEA is already providing funding to the universities to facilitate new initiatives in this area.
FIGURE 8
Admission of NCEA Diploma and Certificate holders to university engineering courses
Source Student Transfer Mechanisms 2000 HEA
This is a vitally important issue. It is important for teaching, research and indeed the other activities of higher education institutions. And my own view is that for this next decade and possibly into the decade thereafter, quality issues will displace the concern about structures which were at the centre of the education debate during the 90s. The essential criteria in addressing quality will be those of transparency, ensuring that all the relevant actors in the education scene are involved in the quality debate, benchmarking, implementation and follow-up. In the long run there won't be any hiding places.
Teaching and research are the two central missions of third level institutions. The traditional university model was based on a symbiotic relationship between research and teaching. Research generates knowledge, teachers transmit that knowledge and of course brilliant students become researchers. Is this model still relevant and, more particularly, is it relevant to Ireland?
Until comparatively recently, research was seriously under-funded in this country. This is now changing with the allocation of almost £2 billion for research, technology and innovation under the National Development Plan. Expenditure on research and development at third level did not escape the under-funding in the past (see Figure 9). Since we are now starting from a low base should we ask whether or not government should fund research directly at all and if so should it fund it in the third level sector? For example, would it be more efficient and effective in terms of raising the knowledge and innovation capacity of the Irish economy for the Government to offer very powerful incentives to the business sector to carry out research and to leave basic research to be carried out in overseas third level institutions and research institutes? Alternatively, if one were to concede the argument that the high value added economy to which we aspire needs to carry out a certain amount of basic research, why fund it in universities? Why not set up separate institutes?
FIGURE 9
These questions, and responses to them, feature in the debate which is taking place over the future of the Technology Foresight initiative and the newly established Science Foundation Ireland (SF1). This is a very exciting development involving the investment of over £0.5 billion - initially in two key niche areas of research and development - biotechnology and information and communications technology. The analysis which led to this initiative concluded that unless Ireland developed a significant basic research capacity in these areas we would be at a disadvantage in the economic and commercial application of the development of new knowledge.
This analysis was broadly accepted. Where the controversy really arose was in relation to the implementation strategy. Two positions rapidly emerged. On the one hand there was a point of view which could be summarised as saying that the third level sector to date has not shown the capacity to provide research leadership in these areas and that the funding which is now becoming available would be much more efficiently and effectively spent in stand-alone research institutes. By focusing expenditure on separate institutes critical mass and capacity could be developed quickly. These initiatives would have a significant international impact and in particular would act as magnets for attracting multinationals to locate key research and innovation functions in this country.
As you know this view elicited strong reactions from the university sector. The contending argument was made that, despite limited funding in the past, researchers in the universities had established strong research reputations. The second passionately held argument was that separate research institutes would not have the creative dynamic which is a feature of the university system. The argument effectively is that the constant turnover of research students and postdoctoral fellows, which is the essential characteristic of university research, brings with it a dynamism and a capacity for renewal which would be missing in institutions staffed by career scientists and technologists. This argument has waged hot and heavy and I suspect will continue.
The second question was whether or not research leadership in higher education is relevant or necessary? My belief is that the case for investment in research in higher education relates not only to the generation of new knowledge and the application and evaluation of new knowledge generated elsewhere but that it is necessary for education and training. In other words our universities and our colleges will not be able to produce the research scientists and the research engineers which will be needed by business, by research institutes and by the universities themselves without affording students the opportunity of carrying out research in challenging environments. Personal experience of carrying out research which meets the highest standards is the best teacher of the skills and capabilities required for effective research.
However, we should not allow the focus on research to detract from the other essential missions of higher education particularly teaching and the need for wholehearted commitment to the economic and social missions of the institutions including the need for commitment to social inclusion.
During the next decade we are likely to see an increasing tension between the issues of accountability and institutional autonomy. The outcomes will depend on positive management. They are most likely to be inconclusive but hopefully they will be a source of energy and progress. The accountability process must be centred around the watch words of transparency, review and reportage.
The wider social context is also important. Higher education has an historic, fundamental and essential role in our societies. It should also have a critical role in helping us to understand and respond constructively to the changes taking place in our society. It could be argued that we are in the course of a transition from what was a fundamentalist society to a society which will have a different character. We have a choice. It could be a chaotic, selfish, individualistic society or it could be a civil society a society based on laws and mutual respect. Has higher education anything to contribute? I would hope it has. We should also of course continue to address the role of higher education in personal development. Perhaps for the higher education sector the vital challenge is to balance engagement with the concerns of society with the detachment necessary to maintain the vitality of the mission, and to maintain public confidence in so doing.
So how will the higher education sector achieve that? It can do so by addressing key areas of public concern, i.e., teaching, research and the contribution to society and to the economy. And it can do so by having regard to three important issues - attention to quality, attention to effectiveness and attention to access.
