The Conversation: Australian Research Discussion Site

The following link (via Colm) is an interesting new Australian site devoted to discussions of research emanating from the university world in Aus. Their basic statement of purpose is below. Interesting idea. My experience of being one of the less frequent contributors to irisheconomy.ie is that there is definitely a demand in Ireland to debate research coming out of the universities. A blog post I put up about one of Kevin's papers on higher education generated nearly 150 comments and, while the most popular post deal with developments in the macroeconomy, people do debate research papers when they are put up. The format of the website below is an interesting model.

The Conversation is an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector – written by acknowledged experts and delivered directly to the public. As professional journalists, we aim to make this wealth of knowledge and expertise accessible to all.

We aim to be a site you can trust. All published work will carry attribution of the authors’ expertise and, where appropriate, will disclose any potential conflicts of interest, and sources of funding. Where errors or misrepresentations occur, we will correct these promptly.

Initially, our Content Partners include the Australian Group of Eight universities (Adelaide, ANU, Melbourne, Monash, NSW, Queensland, Sydney, Western Australia) plus University of Technology Sydney, CSIRO, and the Australian Science Media Centre.

Sincere thanks go to our Founding Partners who have given funding support. Those universities are ANU, Monash, Melbourne, UTS, UWA, plus CSIRO. See also our list of Strategic Partners.

We are based in Melbourne, Australia, and wholly owned by The Conversation Media Trust, a not-for-profit company.

This is a beta site in development. We have a program of additional features and functionality that we will be introducing over the next few months. In the meantime, we'd be keen to hear back from you on any suggestions.

If you have any comments or suggestions about our service, we’d like to hear from you. Email us at: feedback@theconversation.edu.au

HEA Chair on Humanities

I would like to get a copy of HEA chair John Hennessy's actual remarks but people who want to get a sense of how the relationship between academia and government is degenerating rapidly into farce in Ireland should read this report about yesterday's event with Martha Nussbaum.

Autonomy and Universities

It is worth rereading this VOX summary of the influential Bruegel report on the reform of European universities. They basically said that the reason that European universities are so far behind the US is that they have too little funding and too much state interference in process rather than evaluation of outcomes.

1.European countries should invest more in their university systems. On average, EU25 members spend 1.3% of their GDP on higher education, against 3.3% in the US. European countries should increase funding for higher education by at least 1 percentage point over the next ten years. It remains an open question how the burden of this increase is to be shared between public budgets and private funding, including tuition fees.

2.For this effort to pay off, European universities should become more autonomous, in particular with regard to budgets, and also in hiring and remuneration. What matters for good performance is both money and good governance. The two are complementary; increasing university budget has more impact with good governance and improving governance has more impact with higher budgets. We are aware, however, that greater autonomy can be perverse and that it must be accompanied by greater performance evaluation.

Brendan Walsh on Leaving Cert. Points and University Performance in Economics

Title: Leaving Certificate points and performance in first arts economics: a study of the 1987/88 UCD class
Authors: Walsh, Brendan M.; Garvey, Padhraic
Date: Apr-1989; UCD Centre for Economic Research Working Paper Series WP89/6

This paper shows that there is a weak association between Leaving. Cert points-scores and university performance in Economics. The authors recommend that the optimal scoring scheme for entry to university Economics would give more weight to Mathematics. It is also recommended that Irish should be given less weight, or indeed none at all. Finally, the authors recommend further research that would include socio-economic and psychological factors amongst the variables explaining academic performance at university.

What did abolishing university fees in Ireland do?

This is the abstract for a working paper of mine just released by the Geary Institute (& the UCD Economics School), a less technical summary is at the end.
Abstract:
University tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in Ireland in 1996. This paper examines the effect of this reform on the socio-economic gradient (SES) to determine whether the reform was successful in achieving its objective of promoting educational equality. It finds that the reform clearly did not have that effect. It is also shown that the university/SES gradient can be explained by differential performance at second level which also explains the gap between the sexes. Students from white collar backgrounds do significantly better in their final second level exams than the children of blue-collar workers. The results are very similar to recent findings for the UK. I also find that certain demographic characteristics have large negative effects on school performance i.e. having a disabled or deceased parent. The results show that the effect of SES on school performance is generally stronger for those at the lower end of the conditional distribution of academic attainment.

http://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp201026.pdf

Non-technical summary

1. The paper shows how the abolition of university fees in 1995/96 did not help the chances of poorer children getting into university.

2. The paper also explains why this is the case:

• There was (& still is) excess demand for places: there is a shortage of places not students.
• The fee reduction benefitted well-off students, low income ones would have been exempt.
• Most importantly: the paper shows that it’s how students do in the Leaving that matters. The fact that the low income kids do worse in the Leaving is why they are less likely to progress. Changing fees didn’t change that.

3. The paper documents precisely how students from better off backgrounds do better in the Leaving.

• If your father is a professional, count on getting about 90 points more than if your father is a manual worker.
• If your father is “other white collar” count on getting about 50 points more.
• If your father is unemployed that “costs” you about 30 points.

4. The paper also shows

• That it’s the difference in Leaving Cert performance that explains why girls are more likely to progress to university
• That if a student’s father is disabled that their points are about 50 points lower
• That if one of their parents is deceased that their points are about 40 points lower.

5. A clear policy implication of this paper is that attempts to tackle inequalities in university access that do not address these performance differences at the Leaving Certificate won’t solve the problem.

Will work for Beer

A new study suggests that the cliché of a full-time college student working a low-wage job to pay her tuition and getting lower grades than she’d have if she wasn't working is more fiction than fact.

If the student works fewer than 20 hours a week, she may, in fact, have a higher grade point average than her jobless peers and be spending her paychecks on “beer money” or other non-tuition expenses.

These are findings outlined in “Parental Transfers, Student Achievement and the Labor Supply of College Students,” forthcoming in the Journal of Population Economics, by Charlene Kalenkoski, an associate professor of economics at Ohio University, and Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia, a research economist in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Division of Productivity Research and Program Development. The two economists wanted to learn how work affects students’ academic performance and what might motivate them to take on more hours of work.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/08/work

University Blog Interviews Danny McCoy

Ferdinand (sorry I dont normally just do first names but Ferdinand is just Ferdinand from now on as I still simply struggle to spell his second name) has a nice new feature on his blog containing interviews with people relevant to the University Sector. Below is an interview with Danny McCoy, new Director of IBEC that includes some comments about the relationship between IBEC and the universities.

link here

Vox on European Research Universities and Licensing

The extent to which research activity conducted in universities in Europe can generate an economic return is a subject of discussion from a number of perspectives. The low rate of licensing in the EU compared to US is discussed in this VOX page

link here

Nesta

Thanks to Gerard for pointing me to the Nesta website and their document on "connected universities". When I was a young lad, to call someone a spanner was a very bad thing indeed. But according to Nesta, more spanners is what we need.

More seriously though, there is some very interesting material on this site relevant to innovation and university policy.

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-connected-university/