Understanding student applications data

In the United Kingdom the Universities and College Admissions Service (UCAS), which handles student applications to higher education institutions, yesterday released the current applications figures for the coming academic year, and the numbers are significantly down on the comparable figures for last year. UK-wide the number is down 12.9 per cent. On the face of it [...]

Securing compliance?

The Stanford University website contains a list of the university’s ‘compliance offices and officers’. You may wish to note that there are 25 of these, ranging from ‘donor gift restrictions’ to ‘immigration’. And while most of us do not have this kind of wealth of compliance-focused structures, many universities nowadays find themselves almost overwhelmed with [...]

How should we view student debt?

One of the growing concerns across the developed world is that student debt will increasingly deter young people from entering higher education. In the United States the level of graduate debt is now over $900 billion, a sum considerably larger than American credit card debt. In England individual student debt in the more extreme cases [...]

Scotland’s Rectors and elected governance

One of the genuinely unique features of Scottish higher education is the office of Rector in the ‘ancient’ universities. This is a totally different function from that of a Rector in continental European universities, where the holder is the institution’s chief academic officer. In fact, the origins of the office are the same, as originally [...]

Irish university funding: the continuing uncertainty

Yesterday in the Dáil (Irish Parliament), the Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairi Quinn TD, refused to rule out the return of tuition fees. though clearly showing some level of discomfort at the prospect. However, according to a report in the Irish Times the more likely development will be a continuing year-on-year increase in what [...]

Postgraduate woes

When I began my career as a university lecturer, the student body in my institution was overwhelmingly undergraduate. Taught postgraduate courses were quite rare and generally had small numbers, and in Ireland at least there were very few doctoral research students. By the time I left Irish higher education earlier this year to take up [...]

Higher education’s ‘bad ideas’?

According to Larry Summers, former President of Harvard University and a senior politician in both Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, higher education suffers from some ‘bad ideas’. Two of the perhaps surprising ones he lists in an interview with the Washington Post are the end of mandatory retirement in US universities, and small group [...]

Education and skills

Blog post by Alan Carr, Lecturer at the Limerick Institute of Technology The recent changes of title of the Irish Department of ‘Education’ to ‘Education and Science’, to the present ‘Education and Skills’ has prompted questions, here and elsewhere, on the meaning of this change and what change of values or emphasis can be construed [...]

The North Dublin higher education landscape

A key aspect of Irish higher education policy over the past decade has been the planned move of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) to a new campus in North Dublin – the Grangegorman project. This was not just a higher education plan; it was part of a bigger project of north inner city regeneration, [...]

The nanny university?

Over the weekend I was searching through university websites and news reports on a number of different universities for quite specific purposes. A by-product of my research was something else entirely: a list of things, products and activities that these universities had banned recently. The banned items included fizzy and sugary drinks, smoking (inside and [...]