Tag: higher education
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10 things more important than essay mills
The Irish government, via Minister Bruton, is to “clamp down” on essay mills. That trying, in effect, to outlaw d’internet is doomed to failure is indicative of how little sensible focus is exerted on real challenges facing the higher education sector. Here are ten things that are more deserving than essay mills of ministerial press…
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Lets make England’s Brexit led education difficulty our opportunity
Theresa May’s plans for Brexit may have suffered a setback after campaigners won their high court battle over her decision not to seek parliamentary approval before starting the process. Nevertheless, any move by the UK to leave the EU is likely to pose significant challenges. If it is hard, as favoured by the British prime…
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Graduate taxes, not student loans, for Ireland
Governments usually, and often quite correctly, come in for severe stick for lack of joined up thinking. In that regard it is quite pleasant to see the initiative from the Department of Social Protection on moneylenders. Linking repayment to credit union loans to welfare payments allows low risk in lending and thus low interest rates.…
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Four (or more…) problems with student loans
There has been a disturbance in the force? Do you feel it? The opening words of the trailer for the much awaited new Star wars movie might as well describe how the ground seems to be shifting on higher education funding. We seem to be moving towards a student loan model, although there is zero…
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Searching for the HighTech economy in Ireland
A perennial trope of the Irish economic debate is that of the “Smart economy”. This is to be contrasted one imagines with the “dumb politics”. So how smart is the economy?
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Go East? Chinese Universities and Ireland
A TL:DR of Irish university internationalisation plans would be : get Chinese students, link with Chinese universities. Im not at all sure that this makes sense, economically or otherwise.
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Why the rush to replace Universities with Innoversities…?
Ireland, or at least the government, is in the grip of a frenzy around entrepreneurship. From local government, through the higher education system, to the highest in the land, hardly a day goes by without some new band jumping on the wagon. We are being flogged with the mantra that we must start up, become…
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How far have we drifted from the Newman/Humboldt Idea of a university?
Irish universities have a plethora of missions. Many of these are laudable – the reduction of inequality, acting as a reservoir of skills for the modern economy, acting as engines of that selfsame modern economy, a sponge to soak up youth who might otherwise be unemployed… That they are laudable is not the point- they are distant…
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A collection of links to my posts on higher education
Over the last number of years blogging I have written a good deal about higher education. Below are links to these blogposts, for easy reference. I will update this as and when.