As Ireland’s economy boomed for much of the past two decades, prompting wonder at the transformation of one of Western Europe’s poorer nations into the vaunted Celtic Tiger, the country’s higher-education institutions, almost all of which are publicly financed, rode the wave of prosperity that swept the country. Budgets and salaries grew by more than 40 percent between 2002 and 2009, and Ireland successfully positioned itself as a global science and technology hub, luring to its shores scores of researchers and academics from abroad.
But just as Ireland became synonymous with the property-boom-fueled riches of the early years of this century, it has now become emblematic of the harsh toll exacted when governments impose severe austerity measures to deal with the fallout from the global economic crisis.
A recent report by the European University Association drew attention to the effects of the recession on university systems in Europe; it singled out Ireland as one of the hardest-hit countries, suffering from “heavy cuts” to higher-education spending, totaling 5.4 percent in 2009 and another 9.4 percent in 2010. Thomas Estermann, the report’s author, notes that Ireland “had been doing well before, but has been hit by the crisis quite drastically.”
Even as they cope with diminished budgets, Irish universities also face increasing enrollments, driven both by demographics and the recessionary trend of people returning to education in the absence of jobs. The combination has prompted warnings that, when the academic year begins this autumn, students will encounter overcrowded lecture halls and curtailed student services. Financial constraints also risk imperiling Ireland’s success at attracting top international talent, which has been deemed a central plank in the country’s “Smart Economy” strategy for fostering economic revival through research, innovation, and commercialization.
Ellen Hazelkorn, executive director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at the Dublin Institute of Technology, notes wryly that, with its current travails, Ireland offers “an interesting example of what not to do if you are planning for a smart economy.”
A Glass Half-Full?
Yet even in the midst of what many view as a crisis, Lawrence Taylor, the vice president for international affairs at the National University of Ireland, in Maynooth, insists that Irish higher education is, in many ways, thriving. Mr. Taylor has taken part in several trade missions organized by Enterprise Ireland, a government agency that promotes Ireland as a business and research venue, most recently to the United States in March. He concedes that times are tough. “In my own university, we’re suffering with budget cuts and figuring out how to keep the level of service we have,” he says. “At the same time, a number of our departments have been extremely successful at attracting funds from Europe and abroad.”
The government has pledged to protect higher education as much as possible from the worst of the cuts, and, thus far, the rhetoric has largely been borne out, Mr. Taylor says. “Lots of research funding is still available,” he notes, while most of the cuts have come out of the general operating budgets of universities and in the form of hiring freezes, which have been imposed across the entire public sector. Just last week, the government announced Ireland’s largest-ever investment in research, with nearly 360-million, or $462-million, in financing through its Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions.
In some ways, universities have become the victims of their success, as they contend with hiring limitations that can restrict recruitment of top international talent. “So when people ask me, ‘How’s your university doing?’ I say, ‘It is actually doing great, if the country doesn’t get in the way of it,’” Mr. Taylor says.
Ned Costello is the chief executive of the Irish Universities Association, which represents the heads of the country’s seven universities—there are also 14 institutes of technology, nine colleges of education, and a handful of other higher-education institutions. He echoes that glass-half-full sentiment. “We’re in the middle of the worst fiscal crisis that has ever hit the state—you would expect things to be bad,” he allows. Still, he says, “it would be wrong to give the impression that Irish higher education is in some sort of major viability crisis.”
The average Irish higher-education institution has sustained budget cuts of about 7 percent in the past year, Mr. Costello notes, but because of the rapid rise in university attendance rates, up to 55 percent of high-school graduates from 44 percent just a decade ago, those resources “would be squeezed a bit more.” But one factor operating in institutions’ favor is that the preboom years of relative poverty meant that, as Mr. Taylor puts it, “universities here have a long history of doing a lot with very little.”
A European Union report on “the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending on tertiary education,” published in 2009, said that Ireland had the fifth most-efficient university sector in the world, after Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, and Finland. “Irish higher education is right up there in terms of efficiency, both in the quality and quantity of the education that’s delivered for the resources that go in,” Mr. Costello points out. Some of the sting of the latest cuts has been offset by new efficiencies, he adds, such as pooling resources among institutions.
The Irish system has produced some indisputable successes. Two Irish institutions, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, placed in the 2009 Times Higher Education-QS ranking of the world’s top-100 universities, an accomplishment that was widely noted in the country’s mainstream media coverage. Yet Irish universities face a particularly acute problem. They rely more on public money than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, with 84 percent of the average Irish institution’s budget coming from the government, compared with an 81-percent average in the European Union as a whole. (The average for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has a membership of 31 industrialized nations, is 73 percent.)
The government has stressed that, with purse strings tighter than ever, universities need to focus on finding creative ways to do more with even less. “At a time of scarce resources, we need to see our universities collaborating more and coming together so that they get better outputs,” Prime Minister Brian Cowen said at the official opening in June of a new institute being formed by the University of Limerick, the National University of Ireland at Galway, and Georgia Tech. “More from less is the key to us achieving growth and recognizing what the economic realities are and what the exchequer can provide.”
‘There are Limits’
But university leaders emphasize that there are limits to what they can do. As Ms. Hazelkorn has pointed out, even with additional money coming in during the boom years, Ireland remained well below both the European Union and OECD averages in terms of percentage of gross domestic product spent on education, research, and development.
“I wouldn’t gild the lily too much,” Mr. Costello says. Additional significant cuts could leave higher-education institutions in “real difficulty,” he says, “absent offsetting measures.”
One measure that is being widely discussed is the extent to which students should contribute directly to the cost of higher education. Universities in Ireland charged tuition fees until 1996, when they were abolished and replaced by a student-services charge. At the start of the 2009-10 academic year, that annual charge was raised from $1,130 to $1,880. The effect on students, particularly because the size of the increase was so much greater than in previous years, was severe, says Gary Redmond, the president of the Union of Students in Ireland, which represents more than 250,000 students. “Students were literally on the breadline and almost struggling to survive,” he says.
The student union counts as a major political victory that the government has pledged not to introduce tuition fees at least until the next election, in 2012, but any celebration is likely be short-lived. “We’re saying that we’ve hit the floor” in terms of the amount of money allocated per student, Mr. Costello says. “So, therefore, there are issues of financial sustainability with the higher-education system that need to be resolved.” That resolution will require a combination of government money as well as “a revised student-contribution system,” he says.
Students have, of course, also been directly hit by the cuts to universities’ operating budgets. “It’s obviously affecting the number of students in classrooms and, in some cases, the ability of certain higher-education institutions to offer some courses,” Mr. Redmond says. Opening hours for facilities such as libraries and swimming pools have, in some instances, been cut back.
Damage Remains to Be Seen
Because most of the international rankings take into account factors such as student-faculty ratios and international faculty numbers, there is widespread anticipation that Ireland’s hard-won rankings success will suffer when the next compilations are announced. “We would expect all our universities to fall back in the rankings,” Mr. Redmond says.
The full extent of the damage the fiscal crisis will take on Ireland’s universities remains to be seen and is now in the hands of the policy makers who control the public purse strings. A comprehensive strategic review of Irish higher education was announced in early 2009, and its findings and recommendations are expected within weeks. A spokesman for the department of education says the review will “try to mediate the tensions within the system between rising student numbers, funding constraints, and quality of provision.” He added that the “smart economy” strategy remains central to the government’s overall plans for higher education, even if it is not providing any guarantees in terms of public financing.
For universities, there is little to do but sit and wait for details. “What happens next,” says Mr. Costello, “is critical.”
