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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— October – November 2013
O
VER the last two decades, Irish economic growth has
been driven by financial and investment bubbles. Each
one was fuelled by the ad hoc nature of our policymakers’
responses to shifts in global economic trends and their
penchant for fetishising international policy fads.
In the mid-s, propelled by the US-led dot.com industry explo-
sion, Ireland became the focal point of an investment bubble that saw
state policies and funds inflating already unreal company valuations.
Promising to plug our economy into the Internet of Things, entities
from Baltimore Technologies to MediaLab Europe were hoovering
public and private funds in a race to frogmarch this sleepy island into
the twenty-first century.
In , hungover from the implosion of dot.com, government
investment became the new rage. Social Partners climbed over each
other to get funding for awe-inspiring schemes usually described
as Global Centres for Excellence. This bubble too was based on fads
that came to Ireland from abroad, namely from Brussels. To con-
tinue funding our fetish for spending cash we built bungalows at an
ever-increasing pace. From on, the Irish economy became an
economy built on breezeblocks.
With the bust and the ensuing Great Recession, one could have
hoped for a mature review of past policies, and a shift away from our
hallucinated grandiose plans. Yet, to-date, the response of two succes-
sive Governments to the bust has been just to feed our addiction. Even
Budget announced amidst the ongoing implosion of the domes-
tic economy aggressively promoted the concept of the Knowledge
Economy as our salvation. But the truth is the Innovation Island is a
Potemkin Village.
To see this we need look no further than at how we actually treat
the basis for a knowledge-intensive economy: human capital. In my
recent speech at the educational conference, TEDx Dublin, I offered
a template for assessing any economy’s potential for creating human
capital. It is called C.A.R.E. – as it assesses how well a country can
Create, Attract, Retain and Enable its workforce’s technical and social
skills, talents, creativity, capacity to innovate and engage in entrepre-
neurship, and willingness and ability to take risks. In a nutshell C.A.R.E.
is about systems that should put human beings and their abilities at
the centre of our society and economy. Across the entire spectrum of
C.A.R.E. systems, education plays a pivotal role. And it is exactly here
that many of our policy gaps become painfully apparent.
First, our education system does not facilitate a seamlessly con-
tinuous high-quality life-long cycle of learning and training. Second,
our education system is incapable of developing such vital aspects of
human capital as creativity, ability to manage risks, and sustainable
innovation. Third, our education system is inherently elitist. This pre-
vents it from ever becoming a truly functional creator and enabler of
human capital economy. With elitism comes the death of innovation
and creativity. Fourth, our education system is riddled with inefficien-
cies, protectionism and skewed incentives, which lead to sub-standard
outcomes for both learning and research.
Let’s take some of these claims in detail. Since the Finance Act
, Irish governments have been working on expanding indigenous
R&D (Research and Development). In the last ten years, billions of
euros were poured into tax credits and investment supports. Billions
went, in particular, to fund higher-education institutions’ R&D efforts.
While some third-level institutions – our top four or five universities –
have produced tangible results, the rest remain far behind. But even
our top universities have performed weakly. The Academic
Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) lists only three universities
for Ireland with the best performer, TCD, ranked in -th place
Third-level
education founders
Centralisation, budgetary pressures, politicisation, elitism, old-
fashioned non-practical subject-specific, ivory-tower teaching
and lack of academic freedom and competition undermine our
creativity and international standing. By Constantin Gurdgiev
OPINION
INTERLOPER
Constantin Gurdgiev
700
600
500
400
300
200
Q3 2012 (e)
Overseas invention patents
Source:
Author own calculations based on the data from www.newmorningip.com
Note:
Estimates for Q3 2012 and 2013 are based on incomplete data.
Q4 2012
Q1 2013 Q2 2013 Q3 2013 (e)
100
0
Irish non-academic patents
288
204
48
354
248
71
408
225
54
358
229
54
387
231
62
in the world. UCD and UCC rank in -th places. After that, for
ARWU, Ireland runs dry.
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) (published in collaboration with Times
Highed Education) lists eight Irish universities in its top in the
world with TCD ranked th in the just-published rankings,
falling places since last year.
“Trinity’s decline “should be a cause for alarm”, QS’s editor Phil
Baty conceded. “When the flagship falls it can affect the standing of
the rest of the country”.
Trinity said, in a cliché, that the lower ranking it received repre-
sented a “wake-up call” for Irish higher education. Our second-best
performer, UCD, rose places to a still-unimpressive st.For
both teaching and research, absurd centralisation, budgetary pres-
sures, and politicisation have accelerated the brain drain from top
Irish academic institutions in recent years. This, in part, is the driver
for the poor ranking performance over recent years. However, even
in -, with cash abundant, Irish universities’ performance
was far from stellar. Meanwhile, across the rest of the higher educa-
tion sector, both teaching and research remain antediluvian.
As to teaching, instead of developing modern, research-capable
and skills-based adjunct and clinical faculties, most of our degree pro-
grammes continue to operate on the basis of full-time faculty teaching
out of a textbook, and into a pre-set, standardised exam. Furthermore,
programmes are often staffed with faculty members who do neither
research nor applied work related to their teaching.
While top universities around the world are aggressively mov-
ing to new teaching platforms and broadening their programmes by
erasing the boundaries between diverse degrees, in Ireland we still
treat a slide-projector as a technological enabler. Web-based apps,
audio-visual tools, data visualisation and other core tech supports are
virtually unheard of, even in top-ranked Irish universities. In many
university classrooms, students are more technologically-enabled
than their lecturers.
Without modern strategies and technologies, Ireland has embraced
the three-year degree system. If anything, the lack of proper progress
in developing teaching skills and tools should have led to an increase
in the length of the degree programme to maintain the quality of the
graduates. Instead we opted to trade down the learning curve in pur-
suit of higher student numbers.
All this belies the fact that in our flagship universities there are
some individual teaching and research programmes which operate
at a world-class level. Irish academia, it appears, can do excellence,
but not across the whole system. As to research, New Morning IP, the
intellectual capital consultancy firm, publishes regular data on pat-
enting activity by indigenous Irish companies, foreign inventors and
Irish academic institutions. Its conclusions shock.
Over the last months, , patents were filed in Ireland by all
types of academic institutions and firms. Irish academic institutions
accounted for only .% of these filings. Irish private-sector firms
are considered to be underperformers in terms of R&D output com-
pared to their counterparts across the OECD. Yet these firms account
for almost four times more patents than all Ireland-based academic
institutions taken together.
Not surprisingly, the European Patent Office data for put
Ireland in th place in the number of patent applications and in per-
capita indigenous innovation terms, right between such powerhouses
of the ‘knowledge economy’ as New Zealand and Cyprus.
The above data correlate with the poor performance of academic
institutions in attracting private-sector research-funding. In August,
a study by the Times Higher Education Supplement, ranked Ireland at
the bottom of global league table in terms of private-sector funding
per academic researcher. Lower rankings for Ireland can be in part
explained by poor innovation uptake by many domestic enterprises.
However, these rankings also show that our system of higher educa-
tion is inefficient in producing market-relevant research. Given the
importance of such research to teaching and training future cohorts
of human capital-rich workers, this is reprehensible.
The Irish system of higher education requires serious and imme-
diate reforms. At the top, we need more flexible, more responsive
public-policy formation, capable of supporting knowledge-intensive,
skills-rich and rapidly-evolving education.
Exciting new fields such as biotech, stem-cell research, con-
tent-based ICT, remote medicine, human-interface technology,
customisable design and development technologies all require a mix
of skills we currently struggle to provide.
Both society and the world of business are changing rapidly. In pre-
vious decades, generic management degrees offered a good starting
point for on-the-job learning. Today we need both specialist knowl-
edge and general human capital as the basis for entering management.
In the past, specialism was the differentiator into growth areas in the
economy. Today, encyclopedism and ability to cross boundaries of
defined degrees is increasingly a valued skill.
Policy-level changes require introducing accountability and direct
incentives into the education system. Introduction of university-set
fees are the starting point for this. Yet, even more institutional auton-
omy will be required to move to a system of higher education where
both success and failure are reflected in actual outcomes. Successful
institutions should be incentivised. Poorly-functioning ones should
be forced to shut down or be acquired by successful ones.
We should develop an ethos where public funding follows quality
of teaching and research, not political considerations such as pander-
ing to vested interests, jobbery and geography.
We must end political sway over the system of academic research
and higher education. The best way to do so is by demanding more
competition, tighter quality-controls and freedom for institutions
to price their offers to reflect both demand and the quality of what
they supply.
2005-2008 2009-2012
Average Average 2013
2005-2008 2009-2012
Average Average 2013
TCD 252 251 251
TCD 51 58 61
UCD 377 351 351
UCD 143 118 139
UCC 428 376 351
UCC 256 193 210
UCC 426 276 284
UCC 301 310 349
UCC 340 459 526
UCC 418 493 526
UCC 526 376 576
http: //www.shanghairanking.com
http: //www.topuniversities.com
