Despite genuine effort over the past 15 – 20 years, Universities have significantly increased participation, but only marginally widened participation. While more and more students are going to university (definitely a good thing in my view), they are not necessarily a more diverse community of students.

I criticised bursaries as being nothing better than prizes for disadvantaged students who have worked hard and made the difficult choices to get to university, but offering no incentive to able potential students who are not even considering higher education. In an earlier post, I said that universities sponsoring academy schools might help widen the options and raise the aspirations of school pupil. Today I’m thinking more of those who will have left full time education for whom a traditional education is just impossible.

So, while the number of young people entering Higher Education increased by over 20% between 2002/3 and 2009/10, the percentage of those from ‘low participation neighbourhoods’ dropped from 13.3% to 10.3%. HESA have the statistics HERE. This is quite a startling set of numbers that make it quite obvious that new thinking is required on WP.

Why not offer tax-breaks for employers who offer opportunities for their staff to gain qualifications in the workplace, without having to sacrifice their jobs and all that goes with that?

When I worked at the QAA, one of the most enjoyable bits of work I was involved with was a research project that explored how universities engage with employers to deliver higher education in the workplace. What it highlighted to me was the fact that the traditional model for delivering higher education (i.e. 3 year undergraduate programmes delivered on campus, 9am – 6pm, Monday to Friday) has reached saturation point. If we are going to draw more people into HE, from non-traditional backgrounds, then we need to develop radically different ways of delivering that education.

After this QAA report was published, I recorded a podcast with a couple of academics from the University of Derby. I was inspired by what they had to say. They have basically got on their bikes and found employers who want to work with them to deliver HE courses in the workplace.

They have reshaped their internal quality assurance, teaching, learning and assessment regulations so that an employer can approach them to talk about a skills or qualification gap that might exist in their workplace. The University will see if they have the expertise internally or can work in partnership with another university to deliver an accredited course for that employer. Often the employees will already be demonstrating the knowledge and skills required but need support to apply academic theory to their practice, to be assessed and to gain accreditation.

The most important part of the deal is that the University breaks with convention and does not expect students to come on to their campus, they go to their workplaces and deliver the classes there, in an environment that is comfortable and familiar to them and does not require sacrifices to family life etc. study and academic writing and research skills are taught to them.

These students were people working on factory and shop floors who would never in a month of Sundays consider signing up for an HE course off their own back because they could not afford the cost or the sacrifice to family life etc. that would go with it. When you talk to the students who have taken these courses, you get a glimpse of the impact it has; greater pride in their own work, higher ambitions and self-confidence, but also and possibly more important they see that HE is relevant and accessible to them and they will pass that message on to their friends, family and children.

This is the sort of activity is that genuinely widens participation and should be actively supported by the Government if it is serious about opening HE up to non-traditional groups of students.

I certainly don’t think its demise marks the end of widening participation; it shifts the onus on to Universities to innovate and do the heavy lifting on WP themselves.

On my Christmas Wish list I asked for 12 academy schools to sponsored with direct links to universities. (I wasn’t just toadying the Coalition Government’s attempts to get Universities to sponsor free schools, I’ve got nothing against that but I worry that it has more to do with Michael Gove et al desperately seeking establishment endorsement for their flagship policy than anything else.)

Given the expectation that all universities commit a significant amount of their £9k fee income on outreach activities, why  not use some of it to target a failing school in their local community? What better way to demonstrate your commitment to unleash the academic potential of all people than to make it part of your mission to take a school that is failing to provide a decent start in life to its pupils and make it successful?

A university could quite easily use its networks and human capital to pull together the requisite funding and expertise required:

• A PVC or Dean could act as chair of governors, providing genuine leadership and management expertise;
• alumni expertise and networks could be exploited to help support good governance arrangements and build business partnerships;
• innovative research into learning and teaching could be put in to action;
• University finance and legal teams could provide advice and support;
• students could volunteer at the school to support teachers and encourage aspiration from the pupils
• until the school is taken off OfSTED ‘special measures’ all able students completing their A-levels could be guaranteed access to the University

How often do you hear academics and University leaders bemoan the quality of primary and secondary school education, and blame that for their failure to meet WP targets? Well here is an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.

‘We will consider placing a statutory duty on institutions to seek out those with the greatest potential who would be identified with reference to their grades and their situation. Institutions would then have to demonstrate how they are handling these ‘contextualised admissions’. Support would be available from the SFC-funded Schools for Higher Education Programme which would help universities to engage with target schools. A targeting scheme could form one of the ways for an institution to meet the obligations set out in the outcome agreement described above. To assist and incentivise this, we could explore a derogation on the capping system that would allow universities to over-recruit students from [disadvantaged] backgrounds.’

However, this proposal has drawn fire from the Conservative Party, who according to the Daily Telegraph newspaper have argued that ‘middle-class youngsters will lose out as a university funding crisis means it is unlikely more places will be available to accommodate the extra influx.’

So what should one make of this? Is a university education in the first instance the property of the wealthier sections of society, and if there is a constraint on the number of university places, do the middle classes have a right of first refusal? Do we really need to see access programmes as being unfair to the better off?

One of the key requirements for an equitable and stable society is that it provides genuine equal opportunities for all people regardless of background. Education is the main driver of opportunities, and those who do not have easy access to schools with the greatest resources should still have the same chance for higher education as the wealthy. As they will often not have enjoyed the same educational advantages at school it is likely that their examination performance, no matter how talented they are, will be less impressive. This is what makes the case for what the paper calls ‘contextualised admissions’.

I strongly support this particular initiative by the government, and I hope that it will not be distracted by such criticism.

Concerns of this kind were recently discussed on the website World University News by a senior professor teaching in Korea and the chair of the European Students Union.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about the limits to massification: there may well be a point beyond which the growth in higher education participation is counter-productive. But on the other hand we cannot return to an era in which higher education was for the social (as distinct from the intellectual) elite, or in which the opportunity to develop their intellectual potential was denied to those from more modest backgrounds. Therefore, because access for the disadvantaged entails the need to provide greater support and closer individual attention, both the state and the universities need to put in place a proper framework in which students are prepared for higher education from an early age.

If access programmes are well run, the evidence is that access students neither damage quality nor are prone to higher attrition rates. This was in particular our experience in Dublin City University.

Access requires resources, but much more importantly, access requires a different approach to schooling young people with intellectual potential. It requires a national plan that goes beyond setting access targets, and beyond asking universities to address access for 17 or 18-year-olds who are unprepared for this development. In most developed countries we are still a long way away from doing this right.

In this setting, it is interesting to read in the Irish Times that the Provost-elect of Trinity College Dublin plans to look at new ways  to ‘increase admissions of poorer students’. Suggesting that the CAO points system (under which Irish students are admitted to higher education institutions on the basis of a points score determined by the final school examination results) may need to be reviewed, Paddy Prendergast suggests that Ireland might use a scheme pioneered in Texas; applying this to Ireland or TCD, Professor Prendergast wonders whether there should be a rule under which ‘the top 5 per cent in all state schools gained automatic access to the leading university’. In fact, the rule in Texas applies to 10 (not 5) per cent, and we’ll gloss over the comment about a ‘leading university’. But could this idea work?

Probably not, if he is suggesting a specific scheme for Trinity College. I haven’t worked out the statistics, but if the top 5 of every state school were to be given automatic access to TCD, and assuming they all wanted to go, it would more or less remove all discretion from the College as to whom to admit. Furthermore, it would create serious confusion in the rest of the higher education system, and probably a high level of hostility between TCD and the others. But even if he is suggesting a sector-wide rule that doesn’t just apply to TCD, it is not immediately obvious that it would work. How would the allocation of students from these groups be decided as between the 40 or so Irish higher education institutions?

I am all in favour of abandoning the points system which, as I have noted previously, has done more to undermine Irish higher education than almost anything else. I am also strongly of the view that access for the disadvantaged needs to be addressed much more seriously. But the two are not particularly connected. The reason for the unsatisfactory participation rate by poorer students is not a result of university selection practices, but of various social and economic factors, including low expectations, bad advice, inadequate personal and family resources, and so forth. These need to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

Some of Paddy Prendergast’s other comments are interesting and show a willingness to address problem areas in higher education. It is also good that he understands that the route by which students enter higher education is not satisfactory. But on the specifics of access for the disadvantaged, he may want to reflect a little more on what he has proposed here.

However, while right now it seems difficult to imagine that anyone could displace the Americans, there appear to be a couple of countries determined to have a go: China and India. Through a mixture of structural reform and buoyant funding they have disclosed their ambition of leading the world. The Indian government wants to raise levels of participation in higher education from 12 to 30 per cent in just over ten years. Serious research money is also being made available.

However, the Indian government is finding that the universities simply do not have the capacity to spend the research money being made available, and that the teaching ambitions cannot be met unless more than 1,000 new universities are built over this period. Some of these will probably turn out to be foreign (e.g. American) universities setting up branch campuses in the country.

I suspect that the talk about new higher education superpowers is premature; both China and India have established some really impressive and well-funded universities, but there is also still a major shortage of university places and not all of the institutions are in modern, fit-for-purpose accommodation. But they will continue to push for growth.

Why does this matter? It is critical to national economic success, because investment and innovation seek out the location with the most high value and excellent universities. If your universities are topping the charts, certain companies (and actually, the ones most likely to make global investments) will want to trade near them. That is why the current British and American picture of cash-starved universities facing funding cuts and internal turmoil is so dangerous.

The United States (and Britain) can for the foreseeable future maintain their world leadership positions, but only if they provide the money necessary to sustain that. Giving outside observers the impression that the claim of universities for public money is not regarded as any more important than the claims made by anyone else leads to the conclusion that the system is in decline, and this will influence investment decisions.

Demographic and economic factors – as well as the fact that you cannot create large numbers of world class universities overnight – will for now, I believe, inhibit the Chinese and Indian quest for supremacy (though they will both advance significantly). But if the American and British governments continue to make universities absorb large cuts, then the game will change. Governments (and this includes Ireland as well) need to understand the extraordinary importance of higher education at this difficult time.

One of the problems with publicly funded higher education that is free to students is that it limits the resources that could be spent on programmes to support disadvantaged students. Free higher education leads to a large investment in the education of comparatively wealthy people, and relatively few additional resources to target disadvantage, particularly in schools. As resources become scarce this effect is aggravated. The experience in Ireland has also been that the abolition of tuition fees has not produced a noticeable benefit for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, whose participation levels have not particularly improved since fees were removed over 15 years ago.

Those who have voiced dissatisfaction with these figures are right to do so. But the solution will only lie in increased and targeted financial support. Most of that will need to be provided by the taxpayer, with some room for funds built up from philanthropy.  The issue requires urgent attention.

This was first brought home to me at a meeting I had about three years ago with local government representatives and voluntary organisations from Dublin City University’s neighbourhood, when I was the university’s president. I had arranged the meeting in order to consult local stakeholders about the DCU’s strategic plan, and in order to ascertain what they felt they needed from us. To my surprise the most passionate contributions came from those who were arguing (at a time when DCU had just entered the global top 300 university rankings) that we had lost our way and had diluted our support for the community by pursuing a high value research agenda. We were, they suggested, a ‘teaching institution’ and there was no need to ‘run after all those research deals that won’t make any difference to anyone here.’

My fear is that this particular outlook is gaining ground in Ireland, sometimes pushed by people whose main agenda is to justify cutting funds for universities. It is of course true that not every university can pursue research in exactly the same way. DCU’s research agenda, while (I would argue) highly successful, was certainly not the same as that of Harvard. But the idea that high value scholarship is a luxury that we should leave to other countries would, if it gained ground, damage not just Ireland as a location for innovation, but also the interests of those whose representatives I was addressing three years ago. The next generation of young people in Ireland will need to graduate with skills and with knowledge that is typical of the world’s leading universities. Industries that a decade or two ago recruited employees with undergraduate degrees will today often look for those who have done postgraduate programmes or research.

There will still be a need for diversity, and for institutions with different missions. But there will be no demand for lower standards and cheaper education. Indeed, while there is no conflict between social inclusion and educational excellence (provided universities that consider themselves to be the elite are pushed to remember their social obligations), there is a particular need to fund social inclusion programmes well, so that their students can be properly supported and their graduates can take their places in the new careers and businesses of the future. The idea that there is a pleasing convergence between budgetary restraint and progressive social policy is an idiocy that needs to be corrected at every opportunity.

1. Fix the Broken Financing of Higher Education.
2. Strengthen the Focus on Assessment of Learning Outcomes.
3. End Intercollegiate Athletics As We Know It.
4. Build a National Open Access Digital Library System.

Three points made by the writer struck me particularly. First, treat higher education as an investment, not as an act of consumption. Secondly, assess funding in terms of how it supports access to higher education. Finally, in looking at learning outcomes, Dr Bennett makes what I regard as a very interesting comment, that higher education ‘is much too dominated by considerations of prestige and much too little dominated by considerations of real value or effectiveness.’

Leaving aside the athletics, which is less of a problem over here – and indeed, sports are making a positive contribution to university life in these islands – it can be seen that our priorities for tackling the crisis in higher education may not be too far off those that would apply in the United States.

This week with the ‘permission’ of David Cameron, Hughes has been appointed to a newly created role as ‘advocate for access to higher education’.

The role will be a propaganda one, focusing on ‘the effective communication and delivery of the governments policy programme within current budgetary parameters’. Political speak for ‘If your poor then you’ll get nothing from us’

Hughes is of course trying to make the best of a bad job with this role by claiming it will be a chance for ‘every person of goodwill’ to work with him to ensure the ‘best system of education advice, information and support in place’

Perhaps Mr Hughes needs to face the fact that he has been given a job which is a poison chalice and will only lead to him receiving a metaphorical kicking from all sides in Parliament as well as the public at large.

When you take away a persons access to education and therefore their access to a better future than their parents had then people will become angry and will protest and being indecisive in the original vote will not help his credibility in this new sale of snake oil.

Evidently indecisiveness is something to be rewarded in the Liberal Democrat party.

I shouldn’t really spoil the story, but when you get to the top of the league table the positions may be right, but the numbers given don’t add up at all: but hey, it’s the Guardian…

But more interesting still is the proportion of manual background students in particular degree subject areas. Medicine, history, philosophy and languages have the least participation by students from a manual background, while the highest participation is in education, agriculture and computer science.

One of the real risks faced by an education sector during a financial crisis is that of social exclusion and apartheid. As I know from my DCU term of office, we always had to work extremely hard in order to maintain a reasonable diversity of background. It was also noticeable that as the recession appeared, we lost applicants from poorer backgrounds, even when we were able to offer them financial support.

Amidst all the wonderful things that higher education does, it also has the capacity to entrench social divisions, and constant care (and, to be honest, lots of money) is needed to avoid that. Right now we are in real danger of allowing the re-gentrification of higher education, and we had better get moving to stop it from gathering pace.

But it is also important to remember that these advances are possible on the whole not n]because the state has facilitated it, but because the institutions themselves have raised or set aside sums to provide the special support that these students need. It is my fear that as resources become tighter still we may find that the capacity for these special entry pathways will decline. That would have appalling consequences for both higher education and for our need to regenerate Ireland at this point. We must not return to the days when a social underclass was largely excluded from higher education.

‘Trinity College Dublin deserves praise for its access programme to encourage more students from disadvantaged backgrounds to enter higher education. But, sadly, this programme and others like it have failed lamentably in their core objective of opening up college entry.’

The solution proposed is an adaptation of the so-called ’10 per cent rule’ applied since 1997 in Texas, under which the top 10 per cent of each final year class in high schools (i.e. secondary schools in our system) are guaranteed access to university.

First, the comment on access programmes is highly questionable. They may not have reached their full potential, but they have hardly ‘failed lamentably’. The largest such programme – that run by DCU – accounts for 10 per cent of the annual intake and has been hugely successful in changing attitudes in some of the schools and communities that have benefited from it. There has been research into the UCD access programme conducted by the Geary Institute which has also shown the impact of that university’s programme. The throw-away comment on such programmes suggests that some further research on the available evidence might be useful.

As for the Texas ’10% rule’, I must confess I am not convinced it would work. In Texas itself, where the law was passed in order to advance racial equality of opportunity in higher education, the impact was not clear – indeed there was initially almost no evidence of increased participation by the key disadvantaged racial groups, whiole at the same time university presidents complained that it had in some cases removed almost all discretion as to whom to admit.

In Ireland it is difficult to see how this particular initiative would work. The key issue is not a reluctance of universities to admit disadvantaged students, but the effect of socio-economic disadvantage on expectations and choices. Furthermore, the Texas ’10% rule’ does not provide students with support or resources, the lack of which is the main inhibitor right now.

Ensuring an appropriate socio-economic mix in our universities is clearly an appropriate priority, but it is not easy to achieve. It requires careful collaboration with schools and communities, starting at primary level,  and significant resources so as to make higher education a realistic option for students. The by far most appropriate tool for achieving this is the access programme, but this needs to be properly resourced. This is where our challenge lies.

Leaving aside for a moment his other points (which merit discussion), this one doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. What DCU has found (as have other universities) is that people from disadvantaged backgrounds can be encouraged to enter higher education, but doing so is expensive and requires working with schools from an early stage and providing significant supports once the students enter the university. In our case we have raised substantial private money to do this, in the absence of adequate support from the state. We could do much more, but we would need the resources.

And why don’t we get the resources? Because too much money is being spent on those who don’t need it. To put that into perspective a little, according to the HEA in 2008-09, in the university sector, some 22,000 students came from ‘employer and manager’ and ‘higher professional’ backgrounds. Assuming for a moment that all other students would have needed free fees or other supports, this still means that the taxpayer provided approximately €100 million in fees for these privileged groups. If they (and only they) had been asked to pay fees, and even if the state had clawed back half of the money, that would still have left very substantial resources that could have been used to off-set budget cuts and also provide targeted support for access students. That we did not as a country do this is unjustifiable, and unethical. We need to think again.

OK, maybe I am overstating the case a little, but it is time to sound an alarm. Why? According to the most recent available statistics, the proportion of university students in this country who come from a disadvantaged background is now declining. For a number of years there has been an annual increase in these numbers, but that now appears to have come to a halt. In the HEA’s annual analysis of the backgrounds of students, the percentage of students from the groups ‘employer and manager’ and ‘higher professional’ have risen, while the proportion of those classified as ‘lower professional’, ‘non-manual’, ‘skilled manual’ and ‘semi-skilled’ have fallen. The figures for ‘unskilled’ have stayed the same, but at 4.1 per cent it’s not significant anyway.

In fairness, the shift is not large for now, but the reversal of the trend is still alarming. But more importantly, it is very likely that this trend will continue and accelerate. It is a well established fact that the capacity of a higher education sector to provide for the socio-economically disadvantaged depends on a reasonable level of funding and income, and as this drops the very expensive supports for those whose families have no traditional link with universities are quickly compromised. In Ireland we have exacerbated this problem voluntarily by deciding to focus the declining resources for higher education on the more affluent classes, courtesy of the well meant but ill judged ‘free fees’ scheme.

Running a university system that takes its students largely from the more affluent classes is much less complicated and troublesome than being inclusive. But it is immoral. I fear that as a country we are abandoning our inclusiveness agenda by stealth, and if we do so we will pay a price for it in due course.

What we are doing is not good enough.

However, as the 1990s progressed the student admissions scene in England changed. For demographic and other reasons, the older (i.e. pre-1992) universities found themselves having to compete in the UK system known as ‘clearing‘ for students who had typically failed to get their first choices and who were looking for something acceptable as a replacement. And all of a sudden the task of the admissions officer changed from selection to active recruitment. It now became a matter of fine-tuning promotional literature and taking care to have it distributed widely, of school visits and of similar actions; and students were no longer always competing for places, often we were competing for the students.

The change that occurred in England in the 1990s, and which arrived in Ireland some time around 2004, is a significant one. Formerly student selection was an expression of the elite nature of university education, and was connected with the fact that there were only enough places for a minority of those intellectually qualified to be students. With higher education expansion it was always inevitable that, at least during some years, universities would be chasing students rather than the other way round. This puts student applicants more in the driving seat, but it also creates problems. Universities end up adjusting the currency of the transaction – in Ireland the CAO points – in order to secure the necessary numbers, only to find in some instances that the students are unable to cope when admitted.

There is, it seems to me, a need to look closely at the number and qualifications of applicants to see what the most appropriate number of student places might be. Wherever places cannot be filled without  what I might describe as excessive marketing, it may be that the student numbers being pursued are too high. I am a strong believer in making higher education available to people from all backgrounds, and our access programmes in particular suggest that there are more disadvantaged people out there who should be supported in seeking a university place. It must also be borne in mind that the CAO points system seriously distorts preferences for particular programmes. But in the end we should be alert to the fact that excessive recruitment is a sign of saturation.

I suspect that the Irish university system now has undergraduate numbers that are as high as they should be, and possibly even slightly higher than is ideal (leaving out the resourcing issues completely). We should, I believe, make still more efforts to recruit from disadvantaged areas, and our access programmes should be supported for further growth. But these students should probably not increase overall numbers, but rather balance the socio-economic distribution. It is time to be smarter about policies for higher education participation.

Garrett Albert Duncan, PhD. is an Associate Professor of Education in Arts & Sciences, with appointments in African & African-American Studies, American Culture Studies, and Urban Studies. He is also also the Director of Doctoral Studies in Education.  His research focuses broadly on race, culture, education, and society. We will use our interview with professor Duncan to better understand the main arguments and current research within the access to higher education debate, as well as a springboard to launch further discussion about this important and interesting topic.

In fact, it may be that the imposition of fees actually helps the disadvantaged. The most recent analysis of participation in higher education in England has shown that, amongst young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, participation has been increasing noticeably, just as fees have been rising. It may of course be that there is no connection between these two developments, but at any rate it tends to show that fees are not a disincentive where there are proper supports.

In Ireland, while we have improved the position of middle income earners, the national effort to improve access for the disadvantaged has only had quite a minor statistical impact. It is vital that we focus on this, because it would be a particular irony if the era of free fees, however long that may still last, were to have entrenched class divides in higher education. Right now that is how it looks.

The 2010 Competitive Redbook is, well, a ‘red book’ that lists 60 pages of rankings in economic, educational, housing and many other sectors of society. It’s produced by the Washington Alliance for a Competitive Economy, a consortium of business interests including the Washington Research Council, Washington Routable, Realtors, Association of Washington Business.

Regardless of your politics or interest area, the data is extremely useful and insightful and I look forward to the report each year. I even admit to carrying around the little book for frequent review.

I plan to make a number of posts with my thoughts and reflections on interesting tid bits of data. For me it’s hard not to start at page 35 with “Total Fall Enrollment as a Percentage of the Population for public institutions of higher education,” (Fall 2006 is the latest available although I suspect the general percentages remain steady).

Washington state ranks 23rd in the nation in the combined percentages of students enrolled in institutions of higher education. Middle of the pack? Seem acceptable? Take a closer look.

We rank an impressive 5th in the nation, 2.92% of the population, enrolled in our state’s robust community and technical colleges. We rank 46th, 1.44%, in the number enrolled in four year undergraduate institutions. And–believe it or not–we rank a humiliating 50th, 0.31%, in the percentage of students enrolled in graduate or professional degree production programs. Our two year system is strong but our four year system is struggling. We need both of them–aligned, engaged, connected, coordinated–to unleash the potential of our state’s future. The political infighting between the two ‘subcultures’ is hurting us all. And yet there is a certain inevitability to this disfunction until state government decides to embrace both systems in a more strategic approach to their roles, missions, virtues and capabilities.

The irony is that everyone in Olympia knows the dark side of this picture: We are among the most educated states in the nation, with Seattle close to the very top of major cities with residents holding bachelor or higher degrees. So what gives?

We import folks with college degrees and we are falling behind, rapidly and forcefully, in educating our own citizens.

According to the little red book, we rank 6th in the nation in the ‘net (domestic) migration. We’ve learned that a very, very large number of those moving here are highly educated folks. And that’s good. But not to the point of our failure to educate our own children.

The serious public policy problem is that we don’t ‘feel’ the acute pain of this problem directly enough. It’s a long term, structural, systemic issue in a world of short term rewards. We are able to fill jobs with out of state imports and while business is deeply frustrated about this, they deal with the reality in which they live. But I know that parents are feeling this crunch more than ever as they see their own children struggling to get a post secondary education.

Until parents, K-12 advocates, community activists, teachers and others ‘own’ the cold, hard, ugly reality that we are failing to sufficiently educate our own people, we will continue to create a less educated ‘native’ group of future citizens. We will rely upon importing college educated citizens and a workforce until one day we hit the tipping point on our economy. That tipping point, like in global warming, is here. We just can’t seem to get our hands around it.

This is a symbolic representation of our lack of a top notch education system as a state. There is plenty of blame to go around. The Legislature has not funded higher education sufficiently, our K-12 system is not preparing students well enough to succeed, our higher education dollar is torn between a two and four year system that looks too much like another ‘silo’ rather than an integrated strategy, we have a top down model of regulating our universities. The list goes on and on.

Next week we will release the 2010 supplemental budget. Regardless of what you read into the funding levels and footnotes, I am confident you’ll agree that we are not being courageously honest about this extremely serious, complex and difficult systems challenge. My deepest hope is that one day we soon we will.

This is the work of our time in higher education.

We have a beautiful image of ourselves–our perception–as one of the most educated, progressive, entrepreneurial, innovative states. And in a very real way it is true. But the ‘real deal’ reason is that we attract the best and the brightest from other states who move to Washington to seek their fortune and to build quality of life. As for our own children and the dream of widespread access to higher education, that is the dark and ugly side of reality to this picture.

We are so much more than what we’ve become.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.

Perhaps another way of putting this is to say that as participation increases even more, the reality is that students will be targeted for a third level education whose academic achievements might suggest that they will find it hard to succeed in their studies.

On the whole it seems to me that we could, if we had the resources, educate a still higher proportion of the population; there are, I believe, many young people out there who do have the talents and the ability, but who have assumed (perhaps because of their backgrounds) that they could not proceed to higher education and who have not directed their efforts for that purpose. This means that they can still succeed in a university or college, provided they get strong and individual support and some remedial teaching. This is expensive, but it is also usually successful: in DCU many access students had an unpromising academic history at school, and yet they have a strong record of success in their degree programmes at university.

So maybe I would qualify Michael Murphy’s statement slightly, and suggest that if we want more quantity together with high quality, we need to accept that it is expensive to do it right; but also rewarding, and I suspect that any public money invested will be repaid easily.

However, as we know, policy objectives are fine and dandy, but they have little impact if the means to implement them are not available. Right now, as we face significant funding reductions, it is clear that they are not. The higher education system cannot at this point afford a major increase in student numbers; part-time students (for incomprehensible reasons) are outside the ‘free fees’ scheme and thus must carry their own costs; university access programmes (which began in DCU) are not really being funded by the state and rely on philanthropy, which is also not an easy source of money right now. Some of these issues are not unique to Ireland, as this BBC article shows.

We may need to face up to the fact that our supposed agenda of increasing participation in higher education cannot currently be pursued. It is at any rate foolish to maintain existing policy objectives when we have no chance of implementing them. On the other hand, we should consider how important access to higher education is to us, and whether we believe it is enough of a priority to resource it.

But chiefly, we need to show that we are aware of the changed situation, and that we are clear as to what we want and need to do. Our policies need to match our circumstances.

However, it may be worth noting that higher education institutions still offer a fairly inflexible portfolio of programmes, and this has a bearing on the question I am raising here. The overwhelming majority of students study full-time (at least officially), and there is an expectation that they will proceed to a degree by closely defined pathways that keep them in a university for three to four years; unless they go on to postgraduate study, in which case they remain longer, but also for a clearly defined period. This model has a good few operational, financial and also pedagogical advantages, but it is based on expectations of social status and conduct that may now be a little unrealistic.

As we look around for ways in which we can realistically make higher education a target for more people, it may be worth noting President Obama’s ‘Year of College for All’ strategy, first expressed by the President in an address to the US Congress in February 2009:

‘… Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.  This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.  But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.  And dropping out of high school is no longer an option.  It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.  That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal:  by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.’

There has been a mixed response to this plan from educationalists, and of course it will not necessarily be easy to find the right educational programmes for those availing of this more condensed form of higher education. Nevertheless, both educators and social policy experts have agreed that the ability of many people to access colleges would be much greater if they did not have to face the cost both in money and time of traditional degree programmes.

I suspect that, in the context also of growing unemployment and re-skilling needs that we will also need to look again at the models of tertiary education that we currently offer to society. It may not be at all realistic to grow participation rates to over 70 per cent on current pedagogical and funding models, but there may be a way to increase access considerably if we think flexibly about what we can offer. At any rate it’s worth a discussion.

It became quite a lively discussion, and from this it emerged that this group of young people had two key questions for us: they did not describe them this way, but the two questions were in essence about entrepreneurship and ethics. They wanted to know whether our programmes of study would make it easier for graduates to start businesses and become wealthy; and what would happen if our research was ‘dangerous’ or ‘bad’. In fact, the visitors were asking the questions that others are also asking, about the role of universities in supporting economic effort and about combining our work with a strong assessment of the ethical dimension of what we do.

It was however extraordinary that, while these young people were in possession of intelligent insights into university issues, not one of them (when I asked) thought they would ever have the opportunity to study in one. They all came from a disadvantaged area not far from the university, and while they were happy to mess around on the campus now, they did not believe there was any prospect for them that would allow them to become students here (or in any other higher education institution) later.

We are still failing the young people from these backgrounds. Not only have we as a society not provided the resources to make a university education a realistic prospect for them, we haven’t even managed to make them feel that they should at least aim for this outcome. Yet here was a group of young people who, from their questions and comments, immediately convinced me that they would have every chance of excelling here. I chatted with them for another while, and told them this was their university as well as mine, and gave them some suggestions as to how they could get the support needed to come here one day as students. I don’t know if it will happen.

Ireland is, as we know, standing on the edge of the economic precipice. In some ways I think that if we fall over the edge it will not just be because of our over-spending, or falling productivity, or inadequate revenue (bad though all these are): it will also be our reluctance to ensure that everyone has a decent opportunity to get a good education and a genuine stake in whatever prosperity we may yet recover. Under the guise of equality in education we have in fact grossly neglected some of the most disadvantaged in a system that is still heavily geared to the tastes of the middle classes. Unless we harness the creative potential of all the population we are in peril.

At the “Redefining Opportunity in America” education conference last week, Melinda stated that the U.S. used to be first in the world in college-completion rates. Now it’s 10th. “America’s long history of upward mobility is in danger,” she said. “A postsecondary credential is the best bridge between poor kids and good jobs.”

By 2025, [the Gates Foundation] wants to double the number of low-income students in the U.S. who graduate from college or some kind of post high-school program. It wants 80 percent of low-income and minority students to leave high school prepared to go to college, compared to 22 percent today, according to the foundation.

I’m encouraged that the biggest philanthropy in the world is so committed to improving educational opportunities, and I hope that translates into some real progress over the next decade.  And on a personal note…I hope Bill and Melinda like our film.

To read more about the Gates Foundation’s commitment to education click here.