Comic sanity

Here is something we might find a bit intriguing: a sort-of-political rally in Washington DC organised by two satirists working on comedy shows, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The rally yesterday, which attracted somewhere between 60,000 (estimated by the authorities) and 6 billion (early ‘estimate’ by Stephen Colbert). The rally was, somewhat strangely, billed as a [...]

Paying for tutorials

As English universities face up to what looks like a very challenging funding environment, Oxford University has disclosed that it has raised £1 billion from alumni and supporters and that it will use some of  this money to fund its traditional one-on-one tutorial system. While the university has not (as far as I know) disclosed [...]

Incentivising completion

According to a report in the Irish Independent newspaper, Irish higher education institutions will, under the framework of reforms to be recommended in the strategic review presided over by Dr Colin Hunt, have to agree various targets on a regular basis with the Higher Education Authority, and that the latter will be entitled to impose [...]

Photo #12: exotic Ireland

What you see in this photo is Sandycove, just south of Dublin. I chose a perspective, and then a photo editing method, to make the scene look more exotic and sub-tropical. It was actually taken exactly a week ago today.

Understanding why students drop out

Just over two weeks ago I addressed the problem of student non-completion in this blog. Yesterday Ireland’s Higher Education Authority published a Study of Progression in Irish Higher Education, which set out some of the more detailed data on student drop-outs broken down by institution and by subject. The study is extremely useful, but on [...]

Keeping fees straightforward and transparent

For readers who are not immediately familiar with the Irish higher education system, it may be worth saying briefly that there are no tuition fees, but there are charges known as the ‘registration charge’ or the ‘student services charge’. This was introduced shortly after tuition fees were abolished, and at first was fairly nominal in [...]

German unreliability

I suspect that many people, at least in these parts, think of German cars as maybe a little more expensive than others, but to compensate they are better designed, safer and more reliable; whereas Japanese ones, say, are cheaper, less solid and less well made. In fact, advertisements by Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes and others often [...]

Higher education: Ontario and Ireland?

Last weekend the Irish newspaper the Sunday Business Post published an article in which it suggested that the report of Colin Hunt’s strategic review of higher education will recommend that there should be new controls by the Higher Education Authority on how universities spend their money and what they spend it on. More precisely, the [...]

Over-spending their way to success?

Longer term readers of this blog will know that occasionally my attention here turns to football (soccer); this is one such occasion, for which my apologies to those not interested. But the topic I am raising here may have implications beyond football, and may even be relevant to the management of universities, indirectly. Also, to [...]

Can teaching quality inform the league tables?

Now that the autumn season of university rankings is over, it may be worth reflecting a little on what they do or do not tell us, and what merit there may be in them. As is obvious from much academic commentary worldwide, and indeed from comments posted by readers in this blog, many in the [...]