Third-level fees have to come back

sceptre

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

It costs €1,650 to attend a third level institution in Ireland per year. This is the amount people pay for their education. You can dress it up all you like, but it's still a fee to go to college. Even UCC student's union agree with me.



A breakdown of the UCC registration fee shows that roughly €55 of it goes to the students union.

According to a students union officer, the union gets €400k from this.

€400k/€55 equals under 7,500. So presumably about 7,500 people pay the registration fee.

According to UCC there are 12,578 undergraduates. As you can see, there's quite a discrepancy.

The only issue with that reasoning is the €400k figure, ie whether that ignores certain USI deductions. Anyway, it's enough to show that a sizable chunk of the student body don't pay the reg fee.

Ignoring that the SU officer didn't give anything more than a guesstimate judging by the post, SUs typically don't count the part of the student-destined part of the reg fee that goes directly to clubs and societies (via the guilds in UCC). Whereas the universities themselves often count it as one big sum going to "erm, student stuff". It's also quite possible as you mentioned that there's another chunk coming out of it to go to USI (ballpark guess about 50k).

While I know that UL (for example) follows the HEA recommended guidelines that two-thirds goes directly to C&S and the remaining one-third to the SU, I know that UL is unusual in that regard. It's entirely possible that it makes up the entire discrepancy between your facebook link and what the guy on boards said (and with respect, those are pretty crappy sources compared to a quick look at accounts for UCC, UCCSU and the UCC guilds, though all but the first tend to be inanely secretive about the figures unless you go to the meetings, though in that regard they're still better for openness than the UL organisations, who lately often tend to follow the Hitchhiker's Guide model to notices for accounts details... down the darkened stairs, on the wall with the light switch that doesn't work... unless you go to the meetings... if the accounts are ready...). Also, specifically for UL (which has less undergrads than UCC), the SU plus C&S figure is about a million quid so in a very broad sense, UCC's should be roughly similar and probably a wee bit higher. Hence, C&S, there's the probable entire "discrepancy". OF course, then it gets complicated because your figure above is missing the postgrads.

I'd be happier if there were some actual figures with the possibles defined for building a discussion house on rather than foundations of half hearsay from sources that are, well, not as reliable as one would hope them to be for building a discussion house on.

Tragedy

ardmacha wrote: »

Hardly. If you had no interest the quality of graduates you could have a student ratio of 100:1 and give everyone a first.
How else can you measure the performance of education than that people are well educated?

Across different countries, you really cant.

We are concerned with the perceived employability of Irish graduates, not whether they got a job in Ireland or elsewhere.

No, we're concerned with the value for money that the third level sector provides, you posted a link saying it was very efficient, I pointed out you were wrong and it was talking about efficiency vis a vis how many found jobs after graduating and not how much it cost to teach them.
You frantically backtracked and pretended that was your point, waffled on some more about how if they were getting jobs than surely the third level sector must be performing well with it's financial means which has zero logical or causal correlation.

Lets recap:
You posted a link saying irish universities were financially the most efficient in Europe.
I pointed out it was solely talking about employment rates for graduates.
You said surely that means they are financially efficient since so many get jobs in Ireland(what if it was costing a million per student but every student got a job, would that be a perfect system in your mind?)
I pointed out that you can't compare employment rates out of college between 20 or 30 different countries like that, it makes zero sense.
You blather some more nonsense trying to defend the fact you misred a news article and posted up something completely wrong.

Ok!

Eliot Rosewater

sceptre wrote: »

Ignoring that the SU officer didn't give anything more than a guesstimate judging by the post...

The figures I used for the allocation of the reg fees are official UCC ones that were obtained by the Students' Union and subsequently put up on their Facebook page here. As you can see, money allocated to the clubs ("Clubs Executive") and societies ("Societies Guild") is accounted separately. The USI contribution is also accounted separately, and can be found under capitation, though the SU do give the USI additional funding out of the regular SU subscription (the combined USI total is over €100,000).

I didn't intend my analysis to be interpreted as an attempt at finding exactly how many people don't pay the reg fee; it was only intended to illustrate that some sizable portion don't.

The optimal solution here, of course, would be to email the SU president, who is very amiable, and ask him directly, but the University is out of term. If these discussions were to arise in September I could always dispatch an email seeking clarification on these issues.

Eliot Rosewater

From Citizens Information.ie:

Student services charge

There is an annual student services charge that all students (except those who qualify for maintenance grants) have to pay. It is also known as a registration fee and it covers student services and examinations. The amount of the charge varies from one institution to another. It was announced in Budget 2009 that there would be an increase in the student services charge from €900 to €1500 for the year 2009/2010.

http://www.citizensinformation.ie/categories/education/third-level-education/fees-and-supports-for-third-level-education/fees

Websites such as Student Finance.ie don't, understandably, say what proportion of students are in receipt of a maintenance grant.

ardmacha

You blather some more nonsense trying to defend the fact you misred a news article and posted up something completely wrong.

What did I post up that was "completely wrong", for this to be true I would have had to post the opposite of the truth. The somewhat simplistic newspaper article refers to an EU report which shows Irish Third level in a group of efficient countries in Europe, efficiency arising from the large number of graduates, and which refers to Ireland as the most effective given the high opinion of its graduates among recruiters.

If a group of EU researchers, none of them Irish, have analysed large amounts of data and come to the conclusion that Irish universities are efficient I think that you'll have to come up with a more substantial rebuttal than just repeating that I am wrong for citing them.

ardmacha

ardmacha wrote: »

What did I post up that was "completely wrong", for this to be true I would have had to post the opposite of the truth. The somewhat simplistic newspaper article refers to an EU report which shows Irish Third level in a group of efficient countries in Europe, efficiency arising from the large number of graduates, and which refers to Ireland as the most effective given the high opinion of its graduates among recruiters.

If a group of EU researchers, none of them Irish, have analysed large amounts of data and come to the conclusion that Irish universities are efficient I think that you'll have to come up with a more substantial rebuttal than just repeating that I am wrong for citing them.

somewhat simplistic newspaper article.. lets leave it at that, shall we?

ardmacha

somewhat simplistic newspaper article.. lets leave it at that, shall we?

Unfortunately many newspaper articles are somewhat simplistic! The relevance for this thread is that third level education, unlike many parts of the public sector, was performing pretty well by European standards. It is unlikely that these standards can be fully maintained if funding is further cut, hence the discussion on fees.

ardmacha

ardmacha wrote: »

Unfortunately many newspaper articles are somewhat simplistic! The relevance for this thread is that third level education, unlike many parts of the public sector, was performing pretty well by European standards. It is unlikely that these standards can be fully maintained if funding is further cut, hence the discussion on fees.

So much for taking the easy way out... :rolleyes:

The only similarity that an Irish course has with an European course is the awarding certification. In all other areas we are different, and the perceptions of the value by international students is also different. Which in turn is going to be taken on by international employers.

European standards are looking for good pr. To show the solidarity of EU member states.

ardmacha

The only similarity that an Irish course has with an European course is the awarding certification.

What a strange statement! Why should an Irish physicist, veterinarian or marketeer not learn much the same things in Ireland as in other countries. Knowledge is international, the people who teach it move internationally and those who learn it move internationally.

On Boards there are frequent lamentations that standards in Ireland are not up to those internationally (and this is indeed true in some cases). But if someone says that they are up to international standards, then the very idea of European standards is described as only "good PR".

ardmacha

ardmacha wrote: »

What a strange statement! Why should an Irish physicist, veterinarian or marketeer not learn much the same things in Ireland as in other countries. Knowledge is international, the people who teach it move internationally and those who learn it move internationally.

Seriously? Let me put it this way. I just completed a Honors Bachelor Degree in Business Studies in an Irish university. We had roughly 30 students from France, Italy, Germany, China and Spain as part of shared degree associations. They would do 3 years at home and 1 year in another country of choice (in this case, Ireland).

I'd returned to university after being working for over a decade, and through conversations with them found out about their own courses. The manner of the lectures, the type of projects, the number of projects, the amount of holidays, the number of exams, etc... All of these were different.

The Irish college experience was considered to be almost a holiday compared to their own workloads at home. We had less exams during the year, some their colleges weren't semester orientated, we had less presentations etc.

While the actual information might be international, the course content is designed by the universities themselves under the supervision of different award bodies. That means there's a lot of differences in courses.

Hell, there's differences in the courses provided by any of the universities in Ireland itself with the area of Business studies.

On Boards there are frequent lamentations that standards in Ireland are not up to those internationally (and this is indeed true in some cases). But if someone says that they are up to international standards, then the very idea of European standards is described as only "good PR".

Well, from a personal standpoint, I've worked internationally and I would say that the quality of graduates from other countries tends to be higher than that of Irish Graduates (including myself). They tend to have more practical knowledge of work, have more confidence from practical applications (projects, presentations, etc), and frankly have better use of English.

This is of course not including the high performers. I'm talking about the average students/graduates that I've met both professionally and academically.

But the standards in Ireland have dropped in the last 10 years (I did my LC 16 years ago), both with the LC and university exam level. The exams are easier. I've experienced that myself, and have heard the same from teachers in secondary schools & lecturers in universities. So if the standard has dropped in Ireland, then it stands to reason that we wouldn't be comparable to the rest of Europe unless their standards had dropped also. Either way, not a particularly good thing.