Patrick Clancy

Higher Education in the Republic of Ireland: Participation and Performance

This paper describes the expansion and diversification of higher education in the Republic of Ireland and examines some of the principal characteristics of higher education entrants. It is estimated that in 1995, some 43 per cent of the age cohort entered the full-time higher education system in the Republic of Ireland with a further 5 per cent enrolling in UK colleges. While these increasing admission rates have been fuelled by rising completion rates at second level they reflect, primarily, rising transition rates into higher education from those who complete the Leaving Certificate. The greater part of the expansion has taken place in the non-university sector which is characterised by a preponderance of sub-degree programmes, heavily concentrated in the areas of Business Studies, Engineering and Applied Science. A noticeable feature of higher education admissions is the low percentage of older students. The great majority come directly from school with increasingly high levels of attainment in the Leaving Certificate reflecting stiff competition for places, especially in the university sector. While there continues to be large disparities by socioeconomic group in access to higher education, the most recent data point to some reduction in equality. Western counties have consistently had higher third level admission rates with lower rates in eastern counties, including Dublin, and border counties.

The Non-University Sector in Irish Higher Education

In common with many other countries, higher education in Ireland was largely co-terminus with university education until the second half of the 20th century. The key strategic decision taking in the late 1960s was to establish a network of Regional Technical Colleges, which were to provide the bulk of additional places in an expanding third-level system. This diversified system has continued to be endorsed by government as the optimum means of catering for national needs and sustaining an increasingly successful economy. This paper will review the evolution of the technological sector, the main element of the non-university sector. While this sector also includes part of the college of education sector and a relatively small private college sector (Clancy 1999) these will not be considered in this paper. The paper is divided into five main sections. The first will provide an overview of the evolution of higher education policy and situate the technological sector within the context of the overall system. The second section will describe some key parameters of the current system, focusing on the distribution of students between sector and field of study. It also provides a brief description of access to the system, staffing and academic careers, and funding mechanisms. The next section describes the institutional governance structure of the technological sector while the fourth section examines the level of autonomy of the system in comparison to the university sector. The final section will deal with future trends, which are likely to be influenced by the Bologna Process and more particularly by the report of the OECD Advisory Group, which has, at the request of the Irish Government, recently reviewed the Irish higher education system. The recommendations of this report have not yet been implemented.

Research on Higher Education in Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has experienced rapid social and economic change during the past three decades. Its economic transformation in particular is linked to a number of initiatives which commenced in the late 1950s. Henceforth, economic development was to be pursued through a policy of rapid industrialization to be achieved with the help of foreign investment and to be sustained by export-led growth. While this policy has faltered seriously in recent years, the rapid economic growth achieved in the 1960s and through much of the 1970s has brought about a radical transformation: the percentage of the workforce employed in agriculture declined from 36 percent in 1961 to less than 16 percent in 1985. Within the non-agricultural workforce, the main growth areas have been in the professional, administrative, technical, and other skilled occupational groups.