Technological University Groupings - What a load of...

veryangryman

Literally grouping places 100km from each other making it more awkward to locate a course if you're new to this game.

Do any of you 30-40 something guys remember your college saying they were applying to be a TU in their own right in the 90s, 2000s. This whole thing is a cop out where everywhere becomes a uni. If everyone is special, no-one is special.

Saying that, hats off Dundalk for not joining it (i'd hope and pray they still want to go on their own).

Imagine the chats you'll hear in LC students... "Where you going to college? Atlantic? Shannon? Munster?" Like what the actual frig.

Yes, well done to Dundalk. DKIT has an specific interest in 3D Printing technology.

About the rest of your rant, OP: I was in Waterford Regional Technical College when it was renamed Waterford Insititute of Technology.

Oh, and then there was the 1997 General Election. The minister of Education, Norma Foley, was nervous about not getting re elected, but then, De De De, she had an brainwave: Make ALL THE OTHER the RTC's Institute of Technology too!!!!!

Some things never change.

Still though, Ms Foley lost her ministry. Ah well.

silliussoddius

My qualification from Pangea IT leaves me over qualified to respond to this.

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120069540#Comment_120069540

Norma Foley was not Minister for Education in 1997, nor even a TD.

road_high

I think it’s a rebranding exercise- stick the word “university” in for a bit of glamour. Still they have their game substantially in the 20 years since I started college- back then it was looked down upon if you went to my local IT (Carlow) vs Dublin or cork universities. Not sure if the snobbery is as bad now but it was then. It’s seriously more affordable option too vs Dublin which was very expensive then, it’s eye wateringly so now

Yurt2

Not all of the ITs were created equal. DIT was a university in all but name and the quality of education in there was as good as the universities in Dublin (significantly better in some fields to be honest. Their computer science graduates are excellent).

Some of the ITs were and are chronically bad though. Slapping the university title on them isn't doing any of them any good.

It'll all level out. Same thing happened in the UK when they renamed the polytechnics. Some like Robert Gordon and Nottingham Trent University are as well regarded as the red-brick unis, some are still a bit sh*te.

orourkeda1

go on the technological university groupings

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120069540#Comment_120069540

Norma Foley was a County Councillor in 1997, barely out of college. You're confusing her with Niamh Breathnach.

Donald Trump

What difference does it make? You can put lipstick on a pig all you want. The degree will still be from a sh1thole nobody cares about. SETU, TUD, UCD etc etc.

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070205#Comment_120070205

Are you a Harvard man yourself Donald? Are you working in the State Department still or did you join the gang in Wall Street?

If you're going to the reunion, tell that scamp J.D Winklejohn III that I still owe him a wet willy after he lost the bet at the Oxford boatrace.

Fast times, fast times.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070273#Comment_120070273

He said you owe him more than that given the size of your wet willy. Don't shoot the messenger 😋

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120069540#Comment_120069540

DKIT want to get the status without a grouping. There wasn't anywhere logical to group them to, anyway.

The Higher Education Authority requested the rename, not the Minister (who wasn't Foley, as pointed out, anyway)

Indeed, the RTCs wanted to be merged in to a single national Technological University at the time anyway!

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/all-change-for-the-rtcs-1.42414

lawrencesummers

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120069933#Comment_120069933

And still isnt

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070276#Comment_120070276

That's not Harvard talk. Clearly an Aggie or a Buckeye. Yuck.

Jarhead_Tendler

I think box room Don is doing T.Y

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070307#Comment_120070307

Now now, don't be touchy. I'm sure you are delighted to have received your paper from one of the aforementioned institutions 😉

Pherekydes

SETU does not stand for Search for Extra Terrestrial Universities.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070653#Comment_120070653

They were going to steal the name SETI, but couldn't justify the "I" bit.

It actually now stands for Substandard Educators Teaching (Unsuccessfully)

veryangryman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070282#Comment_120070282

Athlone and Limerick have the same problem re: logic and they squeezed something out of it. They'd have been smarted bandying AIT with the Atlantic (we're closer to GMIT) and LIT with Munster (closer to CIT, ITT). Yes we're not on the Atlantic but neither is Letterkenny

My understanding of the mergers of ITs was to give them more purchasing power as a larger entities, reduce duplication of courses in close proximity and to reduce headcount as people retire in roles that are now duplicated across the ITs. There is also now a drive to get industry investment into ITs that you would have typically seen only in universities.

I think the way they merged was a little strange, I would have though Athlone would have merged with Galway and not Limerick, but it appears the ITs were left up to their own devices.

Clareman

It's all about evolution and economies of scale.

Free secondary level education only came into existence in 1967, that might seem a long time ago but there are still people working who would have gotten an education because of it. When the secondary schools were setup there was 2 streams, academic and technical (techs in old world), RTCs in theory were more hands-on than universities but as they grew it was clear that the gaps were changing, for example when RTCs were setup they didn't do degree courses, it was clear that they were more than Technical Colleges, in fact some of them could have been argued to be better than some universities, to help show the difference they became IT's, personally I thought at the time they could have become Technical Universities but that's happening now.

It's clear (in my opinion anyway) that there are too many "universities" around the place, for example LIT had campuses in Limerick, Clare and Tipp, GMIT were in Galway and Mayo, Limerick has UL, LIT and Mary I, combining them to get some kind of economies of scale makes sense, for example does there need to be a different payroll department in every college, by combining multiple colleges into 1 you might get away with 1 in theory, in practice that will never happen in Ireland.

On a side note, academia is 1 of the most snobbish industries in the world, in Ireland alone there is a perception of different levels, the national universities think they are better than the others, the other universities think they are better than the IT's and the IT's think they are better than the others, this always comes up during elections when NUI graduates get a senate vote but no other graduates do.

veryangryman

The Senate is a bad advert for NUI. Get a degree and get a politician's job when you inevitably can't get the masses to vote for you

zg3409

I got a 4 year degree in Waterford at the time it was an RTC. It was actually given by somewhere in the UK, I can't even remember where as they could not issue it themselves.

There was snobbery, people looking down on names. They rebranded them all. I dont know if the merging helped or not, it seemed to me to be like the HSE and regions all merging yet nothing changing except an extra layer of bureaucracy.

It is confusing the new names when some of the campuses are in different counties. I know people who applied for courses, accepted courses but still did not know which campus they were going to be based on.

Ficheall

Foreign students, who pay exorbitant fees, don't know what an IT is. They know what a uni is. That's about the height of it.

veryangryman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120073671#Comment_120073671

Ah we had plenty of foreign students in the I.T days. I guess in the UK, the tans love calling college Uni. Hell I had a friend go over to the UK for a year. He returned and kept referring to the local I.T as "Uni" too.

He also took a long while to rinse out the "calling everyone 'mate'" thing too. Know your audience.

pjcb

I think its a great pity that DIT/TUD isn't offering diplomas anymore, there are so many level 8 courses about but not enough level 6 and 7

Jim 77

Like any grouping, it only works if individual locations are prepared to cede control in one area and gain it in another. One location needs get the full group resources for teaching engineering, another for business, another for IT, another for medicine and health, another for tourism and hospitality, etc, etc.

Likewise for the administration of the grouping, one location needs to be responsible for HR, another for accounts, another for student affairs, another for facilities, etc. If it ends up being nothing other than a name change then it has very little benefit other than fooling people into believing that it's something that it's not and that deception will not last forever.

blackbox

"Technical University" is an oxymoron.

sydthebeat

Someone had better tell MIT that....

blackbox

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077415#Comment_120077415

"University" isn't in it's title.

sydthebeat

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077447#Comment_120077447

Are you saying MIT is not a university?

What about then technical university of Berlin, or the technical university of Munich?

The snobbery and politics involved in the Unis/ITs/RTCs is shocking. I'm 20 years in engineering now and iv probably worked with grads from them all.

In industry nobody cares where you qualified, its your attitude to work that matters.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120069951#Comment_120069951

I was there in the 90s, its had vast sums invested in it since, I was a different place the last time I passed.

I also did done courses in DIT, there wasnt all thst much difference between them and Carlow as far as i could see.

ednwireland

Lots of admin staff being recruited. Another layer of admin that's pretty much it.

2011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077532#Comment_120077532

This.

I'm an engineer working for a large engineering consultancy since 2009. At work nobody cares where anyone else obtained their degree, they are far more interested in your ability, attitude and if you are a team player. The best indicator of this how much experience you have and what projects you have worked on.

DublinWriter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077532#Comment_120077532

Again, this. My primary degree is from Trinity and I've got masters degrees from both TCD and UCD. I'm starting a new MSc programme in a TU in an area not covered elsewhere. As someone who has recruited and lectured, I really didn't care where someone got their qualifications as long as they were from accredited institutions.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058278319/technological-university-groupings-what-a-load-of

100Km from each other you say ?

Wait till you find out about the National University of Ireland

Count Dracula

Total Garbage op.

It is not the college or university, it is what the students learn that matters.

I never learnt anything in university that I couldn't have learnt from a textbook or You tube video. In fact I have studied and sat through an entire year of psychology from Stanford University , it was great and thanks to You Tube cost me nothing.

road_high

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120086645#Comment_120086645

They’re all accredited by the same framework now aren’t they? Regardless of where they come from. Hetac or whatever it’s called

road_high

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077536#Comment_120077536

Carlow IT has transformed beyond all recognition in the past 20 years. It was definitely scoffed at when I had left school then. I think these offer a great opportunity now for a decent education available locally for people that cannot afford or unable to go to the traditional universities especially in Dublin

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120112392#Comment_120112392

Watching a Youtube video does not equate to processing the information, being able to interprete it adequetely to reproduce in a professional setting etc.

In fact, there's a high probability you came away from it with a few high-level concepts you might be able to scrawl on a post-it note or blurt out in a pub, satisfied that you've "learned psychology".

A student in a high quality university will have had hundreds of hours of tutorials challenging woolly thinking, spent many thousands of hours writing essays to ensure they are capable of independently reinterprate complex concepts, will have delivered many presentations proving they know what they're talking about, and many hundreds of hours more doing independant original research.

We've all seen students in a lecture with their head on the desk hungover every day. There's a qualatative difference between them and the student that engaged beyond merely attending lectures or just "listening".

I could spend the next year passively watching engineering lectures on Youtube, nobody's going to give me a job as an engineer at the end of it. And with good reason.

TagoMago

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070205#Comment_120070205

Do employers still care about where you study though? For example, if you had 2 business students, one from Trinity, one from IT Sligo, both did a sales internship with the same company in which the ITS excelled and the TU was average, I'd imagine for a lot of companies would have show preference for the ITS student?

road_high

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120116292#Comment_120116292

I think the ITs are far better for industry and work experience- they’re a lot more workplace focused

Emblematic

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120070205#Comment_120070205

https://youtu.be/5hLHyLC2DqI?t=2123

This reminds me of the young Michael Gove on the UK Polys changing their names to universities.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120116292#Comment_120116292

Don't be silly. (I think you mean a Trinity student rather than a TU student?). If a Trinity student is interning in a place where a Sligo IT graduate is able to get in, then something has obviously gone wrong for the Trinity graduate anyway. Perhaps he received a serious head injury or got addicted to smack etc. subsequent to graduation.

That is what Paddy Cosgrave told me anyways.

Once you have the same level of education your starting place in the workforce is often determined more by family connections than where you were educated.

What a strange thing to be getting angry about.