It’s their skills that make people good employees, not the school or college they attended. We love to compare, biggest, best, tallest and so on, and it serves useful purposes, not least of which is entertainment. But it is an exercise fraught with difficulty when it comes to comparing the quality of outcomes from universities, institutes of technology or other higher education colleges. Sweeping generalisations about the quality of graduates is a risky endeavour which at best can only mislead and at worst lead to crude discrimination. Graduates from our higher education colleges are consistently, across the range of institutions, highly regarded and sought after by employers for whom the bottom line is ability not institutional affiliation.
The Higher Education Authority (HEA) welcomes employers who proactively and creatively engage with our education system. The provision of informed and insightful criticism of graduate ability is one of the most valuable features of our system; it is a dynamic that prevents complacency and inspires continuous improvement.
One of the primary outcomes that as a country we are entitled to expect from our higher education institutions is that they support Ireland’s economic needs. This is not to disregard the wider role of higher education in our society. If it is to fulfil its economic role, it is vital that it graduates people with the skills necessary to meet the requirements of the economy and employers. There are about 190,000 employers in Ireland ranging from about 500 who employ more than 250 employees each, to 170,000 micro enterprises who employ less than 10 staff (the public sector and self-employed are excluded from these figures). These employers collectively, require graduates with skills across a wide range of disciplines, from science to the humanities, from vocational programmes to the more academic.
No individual higher institute of education can meet all these demands, and none should try.
Instead, as Prof Frans Van Vught, chair of the EU Multi Rank process that reported last week noted, the policy approach must be at the system level. It must encourage diversity to ensure that the diverse needs of employers, students, and other stakeholders can be met by the system of institutions as a whole.
This chimes very well with current Irish national policy. This is focussed on avoiding a homogenised system of higher education institutions. Instead, the HEA, acting on the Minister for Education’s higher education strategy, is now working with universities, institutes and other colleges to create a well co-ordinated system of higher education institutions with diverse profiles and missions that respond to the vast diversity of employer and economic needs, and social ones too.
This policy approach allows institutions to build capacity to improve performance in identified areas of strength, consistent with their mission, while knowing that other institutions are doing likewise according to their strengths and mission. Employers' viewpoint From the viewpoint of employers and wider society, we will be well-served by such a system of institutions and will have the broad range of high-quality graduates we need. The HEA, with our oversight role, has a responsibility to manage this process to ensure that the system continues to deliver for Ireland.
We start in a good place. Our higher education system has contributed significantly to national economic development, and especially so in our most recent recession achieving growth in graduate numbers at a time of contracting budgets and staff numbers. And the quality of graduates continues to be high.
Our universities as well as their achievements in teaching and learning also have assumed world-leading positions in several areas of research. The institutes of technology in turn have produced tens of thousands of graduates and the employment statistics are best evidence of their high quality. Last week’s EU Multi Rank report brought further evidence of the strength of our system, with Irish institutions achieving excellence measured at a European level.
There is no evidence to support the view that different institutions have lesser or better quality outcomes than others. The institutions do have, and should have, different outcomes depending on their mission: including whether they are more vocationally or more academically oriented and whether they have a research or a teaching focus. Academic quality is, and will always be, an over-riding focus.
Employers hire people with the skills they need and conduct recruitment as the demands of their business dictate. It would be counterproductive for any business to deny itself access to the best talent, merely by reference to the institution attended by a job applicant.
John Hennessy is chairman of the Higher Education Authority
