Senior academics at University College Cork and the National University of Ireland Galway have expressed anger about a Higher Education Authority decision to take funding away from some postgraduate science courses and give it instead to information technology programmes.
At the end of last month all universities obtaining funding under the Advanced Technical Skills programme received a letter from the HEA to tell them that a new postgraduate IT skills conversion programme "replaces and subsumes" previous ATS programmes.
Department of Education sources have confirmed that the European Social Fund money which covered the fees for a number of postgraduate science courses will run out this year. They said there had never been any guarantee that the EU funding would continue beyond this year.
The Government had decided, on the advice of its Expert Group on Future Skills Needs, that the area of greatest skills need at the moment was IT, and therefore future funding would go to postgraduate students in this area.
At the NUIG, postgraduate students in nine science courses have had their fees paid under the ATS scheme for much of the past decade. Funding for two of these courses, for masters' degrees in biotechnology and applied science (operations and quality management), will not be renewed, and the other seven will see their funding ended next year. These include occupational health, analytical chemistry and biochemistry, microbiology, aquaculture and neuro-pharmacology.
Dr Richard Powell, director of the biotechnology course, said the Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation's (ICSTI) recent technology foresight report had identified three areas of particular economic expansion in the next century: biotechnology, IT and lifelong learning and training.
In the light of this, he was particularly surprised at the HEA's decision. He said it would mean that whereas until now "selection on my course was based just on excellence, in future it will have to include students' ability to pay the fees." These are about £3,000 for the two-year course.
At UCC the head of the chemistry department, Prof Trevor Spalding, said up to two dozen analytical chemistry graduates a year would be affected, all of whom were placed in jobs in Irish industry. He said this was a discipline which pharmaceutical companies had identified as a skills shortage area.
Dr Gavin Burnell, a lecturer in aquaculture, said an average of 10 students per year in aquaculture, and more in a parallel course in fisheries management, would lose their free tuition. He noted that the ICSTI report had forecast that by 2015 aquaculture would account for a large proportion of Ireland's marine food production.