In a previous post I commented on the question of mission diversity in respect of mature student entry in Irish higher education and drew attention to the differences between the institutes of technology and the universities.  The HEA has also prepared an analysis using access data of where students from different socio economic groups are going to college and the results are equally as persuasive that mission diversity is alive and well in Irish higher education institutions.  The report shows that

• In the University sector the largest socio-economic group is Employer & Manager with 20.0% of all undergraduate full-time new entrants. In the Institute of Technology sector the Employer and Manager and Skilled Manual groups are jointly, at 15.3%, the most represented socio-economic groups.
• Students from skilled-manual, semi-skilled-manual and unskilled backgrounds are better represented in the Institute of Technology sector with 24.7% compared to 15.7% in the University sector
• Students from non-manual backgrounds are marginally better represented in the Institute of Technology (9.8%) compared to the University sectors (9.6%).

A key component of the strategic dialogue process I commented on previously will be trying to ensure that mission diversity is a significant feature of the Irish higher education system.  I wonder if in other dimensions of Irish higher education is mission diversity as obvious?

While the recent budget announcements brought pain for pretty much everyone living in Ireland, from the perspective of part time learners there were some glimmers of hope.  Brendan Howlin in his speech noted

"The Government shortly will be publishing a policy statement on labour market activation: “Pathways to Work”. In it we set out our strategy to reform labour market activation policy to prevent the drift into, and help the reduction of, long-term unemployment.

During 2012 we will prioritise places, including in the further education and training sector, specifically for those on the Live Register for 12 months or more. We will also provide for a further roll-out of the “Springboard” initiative, to provide conversion courses to up-skill and re-skill unemployed people to meet skills shortages in new and emerging sectors.

I am also providing for an allocation of €20 million for a new Labour Market Activation Fund. This fund, which will be specifically targeted at the long-term unemployed, will deliver upward of 6,500 places next year."

No details have as yet emerged but this is a small piece of good news.

A key policy objective of many higher education systems is to have a diverse set of higher education institutions whose missions are distinctive and different but which combined result in a coherence that enables the system as a whole to meet all potential requirements.  In practice what does this mean and what would it look like if it were achieved?  Instead of every institution trying to do everything the system as a whole would be characterized by institutions that focus on a smaller number of key objectives.  In Ireland, there are some obvious high level policy objectives that have been articulated over recent years; more part time and flexible learning opportunities, more labour market upskilling and  more students from abroad are just three of the more obvious objectives that reference the type of students and the type of delivery.

Mission diversity can also refer to the range and emphasis of academic programmes being offered and not just to the origin of students and mode of delivery.  Where it is perceived that an institution is moving into academic areas that someone (usually from another part of the system) believes they should not be in it is referred to as ‘mission drift’; IoTs moving into the humanities or universities into labour market skills development, for example.  The National Strategy for Higher Education refers explicitly to ‘mission drift’ in the Irish higher education  system.

Lest one might think that ‘mission drift’ in Irish higher education is rampant and every institution is doing everything, a recent report by the HEA shows that, at least in the case of mature students entering higher education, this is not the case.   The report shows that  

·        11% (2,189) of full-time new entrants to the universities are mature students compared to 20% (3,755) in the institutes of technology.

·        The most popular area of study for full-time mature students in the universities is Health and Welfare (28%) followed by Social Science, Business and Law (18%). The latter is the most popular discipline for full-time mature students in the IoTs (20%), however this is followed by Health and Welfare and Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction (both 18%).

·        Part-time mature students in the universities are drawn to the Humanities and Arts (27%) while in the institutes of technology Health and Welfare and Social Science, Business and Law (both 34%) are most popular.

Mission diversity is alive and well in Ireland, at least as far as mature entrants to Irish higher education institutions is concerned.

The plan for this post was to highlight the recently released consultation document on mergers by the HEA.  Having had the pleasure of attending the annual Erasmus Lecture in the Hugh Lane Gallery last Wednesday I couldn't bring myself to do that  - yet; you have been warned.  Highlight of the evening for me was the collection of laments, hymns and reels from the Ulster Scots and Irish traditions played by the young people of the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland.  The final piece of the evening 'Newfoundland', the final movement from Shaun Davey's 'The Brendan Voyage', complete with highland and uilleann pipes, raised the hairs on the back of my neck; a privelege for anyone of the 100 or so people present.  Oh, almost forgot.  The lecture was by Mary Davis on volunteering.  

With all the talk of the THE rankings in the last few I clean forgot to tell you good folks that the U-Multirank feasibility study final report is now available on the EU website.  The final conference was held in June and commented upon here. The full title of the report is Design and Testing the Feasibility of a Multidimensional Global University Ranking and is edited by Frans Van Vught (known to most in higher education through his involvement with CHEPS) and Frank Ziegler (less well known but a key member of CHE in Germany). The work was undertaken by a consortium involving CHE, CHEPS, The Catholic University of Leuven, OST, EANI and EFMD.

The purpose of the new tool is well described in the report.

We have called this new tool U-Multirank as this stresses three fundamental points of departure: it is multi-dimensional, recognising that higher education institutions serve multiple purposes and perform a range of different activities; it is a ranking of university performances (although not in the sense of an aggregated league table like other global rankings); and it is user-driven (as a stakeholder with particular interests, you are enabled to rank institutions with comparable profiles according to the criteria important to you).

Ranking is undertaken across five dimensions viz

• Teaching and learning
• Research
• Knowledge transfer
• International orientation
• Regional engagement

The tool may also be used to create two general types of rankings viz

• Focused institutional rankings
• Field-based rankings

A number of high level conclusions were drawn including

• Development of indicators for T and L, research and internationalisation are largely unproblematic but the remaining two are more challenging.
• The tool could be implemented pretty much immediately in Europe but would take longer elsewhere.
• There appears to be institutional interest.

Why am I droning on about a tool that currently does not figure in the pantheon of ranking tools?  First, the tool measures institutional diversity, a key component of the Irish national HE strategy.  Second, it is feasible that the dimensions in the U-Multirank will feature as key domains in the strategic dialogue process referenced elsewhere. Third, six Irish higher education institutions participated in the pilot as part of a process of assisting their own mission differentiation.  So the tool is potentially quite central to the policy of 'directed diversity' that is part of the national strategy.

It may also be of interest that two of the six person International Expert Panel for the project have an ongoing connection with significant developments in Irish higher education. Marijk van der Wende is a member of the Board of the HEA while Simon Marginson is the author of the discussion document on TU criteria released by the HEA over the summer.

In an earlier post  I flagged an impending consultation document on strategic diversity, the funding tool planned for use by the HEA to help ‘direct diversity’ amongst higher education institutions in Ireland.   And so it has come to pass.  Last week the HEA issued a consolidated document dealing with clusters consolidation and strategic dialogue and have now entered into a consultation process with stakeholders concerning  its implementation.  In common with other consultation documents released  the document lays out the principles invoplved and then poses a series of questions.

At the heart of strategic dialogue is a compact, contract even (the Hunt report references service level agreements), between the institution and the funder that is designed to ensure that the State gets what it wants from the publicly funded higher education institutions at the same time as helping the HEI to enhance its performance in line with its mission while respecting the independence and autonomy of the institution itself.

Key questions that emerge are

• What are the performance indicators that the state will require institutions to sign up to?
• How effective will institutions be at being strategic?
• Over what timeframe will the funding model be brought in (the document suggests three years)?
• What proportion of the overall HE budget should be ringfenced/top sliced for the performance funding element?
  

As usual, answers on a postcard please to the HEA.

There is an old academic joke that BSc, MSc and PhD actually stand for 'bulls***, mores***, piled high and deep'.  Harsh?  Probably. But there is no doubting the fact that doctoral level training, until recently, often resulted in a student knowing more and more about less and less (I, I modestly claim, became something of an expert in 'nitrate leaching in the unsaturated zone' and a good friend became an acknowledged international expert on 'subaqueous mass transport mechanisms' - lots known about a narrow area but, admittedly, neither were very good chat up lines).  Seriously, the traditional type of doctoral training usually involved a candidate 'apprenticing' themselves to work with a more senior researcher on some particular aspect of a research problem for which the senior researcher had been fortunate to receive funding.  The successful completion of the usually narrow piece of research resulted in the award of a PhD.   The training, invariably in research methods, had some benefits, particularly if the successful graduate went on to have a research and lecturing career but was, undeniably, narrow.

Doctoral level formation (Level 10 on the Irish framework of qualifications) has been undergoing significant reappraisal in recent years as the consideration of learning outcomes, as opposed to syllabus content or research topic, has developed.  Even a cursory consideration of the learning outcomes for a level 10 graduate shows that meeting  them may be achieved in a variety of ways and that it is their attainment and not the mode of attainment that is important.  As the development of a learning outcomes approach to education generally and higher education specifically has become better understood it has allowed innovative thinking about how learning can better be assisted and how assessment strategies can be more carefully developed; doctoral level formation is no different to other levels of higher education.  Currently at least three approaches to level 10 (doctoral) formation, in addition to the traditional apporach, are increasingly being adopted.

• Structured doctorates  take the traditional model and include a wide range of more generic knowledge, skill and competence development programmes, e.g. research methods, enterprise development, communication skills, etc.  A good example is the recently launched ed4life porgramme in the life sciences offered by CIT in partnership with UCC and companies in the Cork region.
• Taught doctorates combine a significant taught programme, often counting for half the quantum of learning, with a major thesis.  A good example is the DGov programme offered by QUB in conjunction with the IPA in Dublin. 
• Professional doctorates are a more recent development and differ qualitatively from traditional or structured PhD's in that the candidate is expected to demonstrate a significant contribution to practice usually in a practical/organisational setting.  Middlesex University has been offering the DProf qualification for several years.

'Piled high and deep'?  No. Broad, deep and balanced? Yes.

In late summer 1978, after spending the summer working in San Fancisco, I travelled by Greyhound Bus to New York with a detour north from Chicago to visit a cousin in Appleton, Wisconsin.  The bus travelled the whole time with passengers sleeping, eating and washing as best they could.  The journey from San Francisco to Chicago took about 3 days as I recall.  The travelling population constantly changed and characters came and went; the GI from Nebraska which was, according to the other passengers who were constantly slagging the GI, in Omaha; the guy whose job it was to drive yellow school buses from somewhere in Illinois to the west coast, return via Greyhound, and then start all over again.  This individual was particularly chatty and clearly enjoyed his work but did point out that he came across strange people and that 'you need to have one of these' at which point he pulled out a Colt 45 - at least that is what I think it was.  Several days after my conversation with this individual I arrived late at night to Chicago's bus station for an all night stopover before getting an early morning bus to Appleton.  Suffice to say that that night I was a singular member of an ethnic minority, convinced that I was surrounded by drug dealers and other unsavouries and wishing that I was a US national and able to own 'one of these' - for personal security reasons of course.

I was reminded of that road trip quite recently while listening to a group of students talking about having to overnight in Dublin Airport.  What made life bearable for their overnight was having access to an all night Starbucks.  I don't know whether there is an all night Starbucks in Dublin Airport or not and it does not really matter.  What is important is that travel, even when it is uncomfortable - perhaps even more so when it is uncomfortable, offers chances to see all of humanity and engage with life in ways that are often not possible under normal circumstances. 

I would like to think that as we work our way out of the current recession that travel will recapture its role in broadening the mind and helping one to engage with life and not be undertaken for solely economic reasons.

Public discourse on higher education tends to focus on universities and institutes of technology.  The valuable contribution that a wide range of small (and not so small) higher education institutions make to higher education in Ireland , and which are not IOTs or universities, is understated in that discourse.  A key policy aim of the National Strategy for Higher Education is to move from a model of engagement that focuses on individual institutions to one in which the focus is on the system.  Inevitably, this shift in policy will draw institutions other than IOTs and universities into policy development and discussion.

Three broad types of independent and private providers are recognisable

• ·         Those in receipt of core grant (partial or full) and free fees funding
• ·         Those in receipt of free fees funding only
• ·         Colleges in receipt of no direct funding.

The policy position in respect of each of these types of institutions is likely to be very different but certain elements are already clear.  First, the HEA is to assume responsibility for the funding of the many institutions that are currently funded directly by the DES.  Second, smaller institutions will be encouraged to merge to create larger institutions.  Third, greater use of contracted provision of graduates in specific discipline areas will feature in the State’s efforts to address the growing demand for higher education – just like the Springboard initiative in which the independent providers featured strongly.

I suspect that staff from the independent and private colleges are set to become more familiar with Brooklawn House(home of the HEA) and staff of the HEA will be using Google Maps for directions to the many new colleges that will become part of their responsibility.

In a recent address the Chief Executive Officer of the HEA, Tom Boland, signalled an end to 'light touch' regulation and a move to 'directed diversity' within our higher education system.  The term 'directed diversity' includes a descriptor - 'diversity' - and an action - 'directed'.  The descriptor derives directly from the Hunt report which states as a policy aim the development of a 'coherent set of higher education institutions, each of significant strength, scale and capacity and with complementary and diverse missions that together meet individual, enterprise and societal needs'. The action term 'directed' implies that the process of moving towards a 'coherent set ...' will not be passive.  The Hunt report goes further and indicates that a process known as 'strategic dialogue' would be the mechanism used to ensure the development of a 'coherent set .......'.  In an earlier post I noted that strategic dialogue was one of the tools available to steer a higher education system so as to achieve state objectives without compromising the independence and autonomy of higher education institutions, which, in Ireland, are generally protected through legislation.  Where has strategic dialogue come from and how will it work?

In the early part of the last decade the Hong Kong educational authorities, recognising the need for 'a higher education sector with institutions operating in distinctive but collaborative and complementary roles' to ensure HK remained competitive internationally and within the region' moved to the introduction of '...performance and role related funding into the ...
funding methodology .... This important undertaking will tie into funding allocation, performance- and performance against role- much more rigorously than in the past'.   Although the Hong Kong document did not use the term 'strategic dialogue' the intent was clear; funding would be tied to performance against agreed role specific objectives.  In Ireland, a consultation paper on the strategic dialogue process will emerge in the Autumn so, as yet, the specifics, atre not clear about how exactly it will operate.  the principles are however clear.  Institutions will be required to commit to specific roles, agree to appropriate performance targets and then, depending on the performance, receive a portion of their funding on the basis of achievement against those targets.  

A brave new world.