Ferdie warns cuts will cause standard of education to drop in ‘next year or two’

DCU president Ferdinand von Prondzynski has warned that it is “inevitable” that the standard of third level education in Ireland is set to drop “over the next year or two” because of cuts being made by the government to education.

He says that it is DCU’s intention to ensure the student experience “will be the last to be affected by cuts” with the university trying to focus cuts onto areas that will not directly affect students.

However, he says that focusing cuts on non-student areas “can only go on for so long” and that the student experience is set to be impacted upon given that, “even… administrators in the finance office have an impact on what we can do.”

He says there are also other implications by government cuts, “in terms of our ability to maintain buildings and equipment… and to stock the library.”

Fine Gael’s spokesperson for education, Brian Hayes, told the College View that government cuts coupled alongside increases in the registration fee are ensuring the student experience is being diminished.

He says: “It’s inevitable that as long as registration fees have been hiked so dramatically that students are finding it increasingly difficult to survive and basic student services are reduced… the student experience will be diminished.”

John Murphy, the DCUSU education and welfare officer says he feels there is a possibility that the cuts to education may lead to the quality of third level education being reduced.

However, he says that “it’s very difficult to say until we see exactly where the cuts are going to happen in the university.”

Murphy feels that it is possible to reduce the power of the cuts on students with the SU and the university working together to “creatively come up with ways” to reduce the pain.

According to the DCU president, the fact that DCU, unlike many other third level institutes, is operating without an existing debt means that the university is in a better position than many other colleges who “have an additional obligation to clear an existing debt” alongside their obligation to provide a proper standard of education.

However, he feels that because of the budget cuts faced by DCU, there “may be a competitive disadvantage” in the value of students’ degrees against those from other countries, such as Australia, where they have managed to survive the recession relatively unharmed.

He says that it is clear Ireland “spends too little on education as a whole,” with the biggest failure in Irish education being “in preschool education where we do almost nothing, which has a huge impact on the quality of education subsequently.”

President von Prondzynski says that so far Irish higher education institutes have been able to draw on “reserves and peoples’ commitment and good will” to allow for a quality of education higher than the amount paid, but that this “won’t go on forever.”