What is the role of higher education in the twenty first century workplace?
10 Mar 2006
Conference Address by Peter Rigney, Grand Hotel, Malahide, Dublin, March 10th
There is a broad consensus between Congress and IBEC on the central role of higher education in the development of Irish society. This is based on the conviction that increasing the aggregate level of learning in society brings positive returns all around. For employers it brings a more productive workforce with the capacity to adapt to complex processes, while for workers learning brings higher lifetime earnings and is a form of insurance against unemployment.
At another level, we have very distinct interests. The job of unions is to pursue the objective of a just society. We do this by our collective influence to achieve a redistribution of wealth in the economy. We are the only actors in the market with this objective. You as university people are lucky because you are close to that rare commodity - perfect competition. It exists - some would say it only exists within the lecture halls and seminar rooms of your economics departments. Competition is seldom perfect. The market economy is capable of generating great wealth but it has no imperative to share that wealth. Left to itself the market will concentrate wealth in the hands of the most powerful actors and will tend towards ever greater inequality. The same could perhaps be said of the educational market place, but I will return to that later on.
Congress is the largest civil society organisation and is one united body covering the entire island, in contrast to the European norm of multiple trade union centres. . We have set out the learning aspect of our vision for the workplace of the future in our publication 'lifelong learning everybody wins' which forms the basis of our approach to education in the current partnership talks. We have flagged a number of major items in these discussions, two of which are of direct relevance to the higher education sector. These two issues are the issue of learning leave and of the remission of fees for part time learners. On some of these items we can make common cause with employers on others we may not. However, this is the first time we have put education linked demands as apart of our headline demands in a wage round. It will encourage adults to return to learning on a scale that has not been apparent to date. This is important for the institutions but in the medium term it is also important for Irish economy and society. It will if successful free up a group of willing learners, who will in turn we hope make it worthwhile for third level institutions to provide or to adapt courses for them. This is against the background of a declining number of students coming through the leaving certificate each year.
Universities always interacted with the world of employment. In their earliest incarnations they were schools of theology which later grew faculties of medicine under the influence of Islam. The classic nineteenth century university with its liberal arts degrees served the function of providing a cadre of administrators for the British Empire.
It can also be argued have always had an uneasy relationship with their immediate neighbours or funders -the town and gown riots of the later medieval period spring to mind in this context.
So the question is not "are universities tied in to the functioning of the labour market?"- they are. The question is how that connection should work and how should the universities respond to short, medium and long term demands for changing qualifications. There must be a responsiveness, but not on a knee jerk basis. Courses cannot be switched on and off, and there is a finite talent pool. We have in the republic the expert group on future skill needs which attempts skill forecasting. Before it recently refined its mandate the expert group looked at individual sectors and sub sectors seemingly oblivious of the fact that their recommendations involved fishing in the same pool of potential students.
There is another factor which regulates the responsiveness of the universities to the labour market and that is student choice - or parental choice whatever guides the hand of young people when they fill in CAO or UCCA forms. These forms are filed in on the basis of prospective careers and of career expectations. We can see this in the way competing demand for computing courses plummeted in the wake of the burst of the dot com bubble. We saw it in yesterday's newspapers as the CAO first choices were parsed. This process represents the sum of the individual choices of many thousands of individuals and it is for this reason that I am somewhat concerned at the somewhat hectoring tones of the policy chattering classes towards the result of these choices. We live in Ireland, not the German Democratic republic and if certain disciplines are declining in popularity the providers have choices. They can either cut standards; devise new qualifications which can be deployed in more concentrated areas, or engage new learner groups. Lowering standards are hardly an option given the National framework of qualifications, so we must look at the other options. In the case of engineering where alarm bells have been sounding for some time we should look more at the rare initiatives undertaken by higher education institutions to attract adult learners or to upgrade technicians to chartered engineer status. It is a far more fruitful exercise than blaming the pupils.
Regarding the skill needs of the economy as a whole there is another demand side constraint: many of the companies of ten years time are not in existence today, so it is useless to try and predict their generic skill needs. Additionally many individuals will of their own accord go away and acquire a new qualification which will equip them for work in a different sector. We should not therefore confuse the skill needs of employment in the economy with the sum total of the skill needs of individual employers. A classic example is archaeologists. From a supply side this discipline is seen as the classic liberal arts subject yet from the demand side is a quasi technical skill which is in demand by construction employers as they are central to the speedy execution of large construction projects.
The higher education sector is at the heart of the economic and social development of our society. Universities in turn form a significant part of the higher education sector. The sector is central to driving things such as 'a knowledge based economy'-'moving up the value chain'- 'the Lisbon agenda'. The fact that these phrases may be in danger of entering the dictionary of diseased English should not blind us to their significance. These phrases describe actions and states which we regard as central to the continuing evolution of the Irish economy. Their clichéd status may be an irritant but these phrases are a constant warning against complacency and over confidence which are two threats to our current economic well being.
There is another phrase which has come into the Irish economic discourse within the last twelve months. Players in the area of learning ignore it at their peril. That is the phrase 'one step up' which is contained in the report of the enterprise strategy group, otherwise known as the O Driscoll report. In terms of policy this is going to be the major focus over the next decade, and institutions providing learning are going to be judged by their success or otherwise in achieving this objective.
The university sector is in a state of change: In the discourse we see a discussion of university reform; we can see it in the IUA paper on 4th level. The university sector is trying to come to terms with changing demographics, with the globalisation of education and with the paymaster (government) placing more and more demands to measure quality and outputs. This is seen by some as a mixed blessing, to say the least. To the outsider the debate on reform is not always comprehensible. It surfaces from time to time in newspapers coverage of disputes over restructuring proposals. What is remarkable is that the debate on reform comes without any seeming demand from society at large for the reform. Contrast this to the health sector. We know why we need a health service reform, yet nobody seems to articulate why we need university reform.
From my point of view the need for university reform arises from the fact that access to third level education is the surest passport to lifelong high earning power. The distribution of learning chances is therefore a proxy for the distribution of wealth over generations. Education now takes the place that land once had in the transfer of wealth between generations. Let us apply the legal principle of 'cui bono' to analyse third level access and see who benefits. The system serves the needs of the economy, but it is a matter of some question whether it serves the needs of society. The blame for this outcome can be spread across the primary secondary and tertiary sectors, as well as the social infrastructure. However if you look at the commentary which accompanies the various reports on this subject you will sees that the blame is placed almost by osmosis on the Higher Education institutions, and in particular the universities. This need not be the case and there are a number of strategies which can be adopted to combat this phenomenon. Universities have clear choices in the area and do not have to be passive actors in accepting blame where it is not appropriate. This means developing and renewing programmes which broaden their reach across social class (which they do) and across age cohort (which they tend not to do in a structured way)
What are we to make of the 'who goes to college' story in the Times last week based on the HEA survey? I regard this story as a classic example of two phenomena - the myth of the free market and the law of unintended consequences. Firstly the myth of the free market. We live in a market society therefore if money can purchase a commodity it will be purchased. The free fees initiative injected money into the marketplace and the law of unintended consequences cut in. Quite recently a retired senior academic said to me that with the right grind schools and a strategic choice of course it is possible for moneyed parents to resource the acquisition of a degree by even the dimmest of their offspring. Given the key role of a third level education in transferring wealth between generations, the free market will produce the result we see.
In fact the pattern of participation revealed in the recent HEA report is quite encouraging in some respects. The increased participation by that participation of skilled manual workers being one example. However it also reveals the operation of the law of unintended consequences as the money saved by free fees initiative was applied in some cases to the purchase of private schooling.
The fees issue has exercised the minds of educators and administrators for some time. In response to Turlough's comment I would say that most voters will say' what we have we hold.' They may even accept the economic case for a return but only I suspect as a form of laboratory experiment. Arguing that a return of fees would improve access or equity goes against the evidence that is beginning to emerge from the UK and would seem to run against what is emerging from the HEA survey. The root of this phenomenon may be found in the lack of public trust in student support schemes. There is a view abroad that particular outcomes can be massaged for favoured applicants. Land assets are not taken into account when determining means, while parents who are self employed can write grant applications which are patent works of fiction, which are then taken at face value by the authorities. While this situation continues and in the absence of any serious effort to reform the student support system is it any wonder that the return of fees is seen as a political kiss of death. The congress view is that whatever the fees scheme that is adopted full time and part time students must be treated equally. The only acceptable means test from our point of view is an educational means test. This would allow students who had not attained a degree to pursue one with the same level of fees support regardless of their age or economic status. This support could involve either the waiving or refunding of tuition fees. Arguments by the Department of Finance against this proposition bear an uncanny resemblance to the arguments trotted out in the mid sixties by the same department against the Donogh O Malley reforms.
Before we consider any brave experiments on student support we should have need to have made significantly more progress on issues of access and of the system catering for mature students. In addition - and this is not for this forum we need to establish a certainty that a fixed percentage of grant applications will be audited by revenue. That being said and as an interim measure, my organisation would have no objection if HEIs were allowed to charge a fee to students equivalent to the annual fee charged at the school where they sat their leaving
The university sector is putting forward an impressive and ambitious programme to create what is termed a fourth level sector. This has an extremely ambitious price tag which may present a problem given our collective view on taxes. The core bargain which sustained the partnership project over the years was a trade off between modest wage growth and income tax reductions. Taken together, and from the viewpoint of the ordinary person, these elements of the bargain, although they worked, might be considered to have something of a Faustian aspect to them. Still, ending large scale unemployment and emigration was a price worth some sacrifices. However the need to develop a thriving fourth level sector needs to command a broad measure of support in society as a whole. It needs to be accompanied by firm assurances against academic drift and accompanied by measures to improve the representativeness of the third level sector.
I believe we need to be radical and innovative in our approach to the issue of access. We need to identify who we are targeting. I would suggest that one area is young men who consistently under perform young women. It may be easier to tempt them in as mature students and you may get better retention rates. We also need to look more broadly than the 18 to 20 age cohort and see how we can re ignite the desire to learn in twenty somethings thirty somethings and beyond. There is I know suppressed grumblings in some departments and faculties about the greater challenges posed by learners recruited through access initiatives. Maybe the grumblers might find that returning mature students were a lot less difficult, but that might involve some Saturday work as mature students often combine work with study. While the recent HEA report shows some welcome progress on mature student numbers they still constitute only a fraction of the potential. Cracking this problem will be a key component in 'moving up the value chain' or the 'one step up' approach.
Universities have a central part in the growth and evolution of our society. How they position themselves now will be of crucial importance to their success of the sector as we go into the century. Fifty percent of the current age cohort progress to third level so will in general be positively disposed towards the sector. However if we project back ten or twenty years we find that 80% of the workforce did not get a third level education. Most of these people are still in the labour market. Thus the majority of the Irish taxpaying workforce has not gone to college. Hitting that market will be one of the key challenges - I would suggest a potentially rewarding one.
The universities had an unhappy relationship with Thatcher's Britain - we are told because of Oxford's refusal to grant her an honorary doctorate Whatever the reason those years saw the putting in place of university reform. It saw the funding of universities being linked to a research assessment evaluation - a system which has to put it mildly provoked mixed views. However from my point of view the most significant point is that most of this system remained in place post 1997, indicating that it was fully compatible wit the new labour project. To me, this goes to the heart of the point. The universities because of their role in educating the elite will always be the target of criticism. This criticism is often based on misconceptions and frequently on stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is that they generally have a grain of truth at the centre. Universities seem slow to combat these stereotypes, despite the fact that it is in their own interests, and in the interests of the common good that they do so. Universities are vulnerable to populist anti intellectual rants against the ivory tower. The best defence against this is a group of alumni spread across all sectors of society.
In the Republic, the management of the universities by the state has been a more arm length affair. This may be due to the fact that administering a small state can be easier that administering a large state. In the last fifteen years universities have been given a new legislative framework, a partial exemption from the procedures under the national framework of qualifications and an approach to quality management which is based on self regulation. If this approach works - and one hopes that it will- it will result in the seamless integration of the university award system into the national framework. There is however no reserve of sympathy for systems of self regulation. Self regulation should I suggest be regarded as a privilege accorded to the university sector, which brings with it a set of responsibilities.
The society and the economy of this island have changed rapidly over the last two decades. This is the result of the operation of a number of factors to produce a virtuous cycle. However a number of these assumptions may now be coming to an end of their life cycle and may not be relied upon in perpetuity. One of these factors is the low tax regime which may be less attractive in the face of fiscal competition from the likes of the Baltic States. Another is the assumptions regarding labour supply. If our current economic strength was based on one slogan it was the 'young Europeans' which was on the IDA advert on the arrivals corridor in Dublin airport. This described an assumption that we had an endless pool of students for our HEIs. This is no longer the case. The number doing the leaving certificate continues to decline. Some of those young Europeans will be thirty somethings or forty somethings. We have not yet seen a multi national close blaming the lack of the skilled labour force it was promised when setting up, but can this be far off? The challenge to stay ahead of the curve is a challenge to the higher education institutions as the main providers of higher knowledge. If the HEIs do not succeed in mobilising more adult learners combining learning with work our continuing economic prosperity cannot be taken for granted. This is the challenge of the twenty first century and it is a challenge which I am sure the higher education institutions will be equal to.