Covid-19 has changed many sectors, perhaps fundamentally in many cases. We are not sure yet what global tourism will look like when it recovers. While the way we socialise is likely to have been upended, if not permanently then at least for the next few years to come. How and where we live, work and relax appear to have undergone a dramatic shift – in many regards the realisation of the technophile’s dream, with an internet connection replacing physical proximity as the key ingredient.

How and where we learn is also fundamentally changing. While pre-primary, primary and secondary education are – understandably – trying to steer as close to business as usual as possible, there is an expectation that higher education will never be the same again. Certainly, the disruption this year will be significant. As Irish Twitter user @raychelelel posted during the week: “Using my own laptop, my own internet, in a house where I’m paying rent and electricity, with no or VERY limited access to on-campus facilities. How can you charge me €3,000?”

Higher education is about community as well as instruction

There is a line of thought that says, once lectures go online, it is a short step from choosing to listen to recordings of your local lecturer to tuning in instead to one of the world’s best experts on the same subject. And with that, this line of thought holds, comes the ultimate threat to the future of Ireland’s higher education institutes.

This line of thinking, however, conflates one element of higher education – the passive receipt of information from a subject matter expert – with the entire learning process in higher education. Even setting aside the time that lecturers will be spending in the 2020/2021 academic year recording their material – which could be argued is a once-off up-front cost – it is likely that the time spent per student will go up, not down, for teaching staff, if lectures and tutorials go online. This is because the vast majority of learning happens not when the student sits passively listening to content but rather in other forms. This includes taking the time to digest the material on their own – but also interactions with peers and with teaching staff in small groups, tutorials, at office hours and in other settings. Almost all those settings are unavailable to students in the coming academic year – in particular, informal discussion with peers – meaning that teaching staff are likely to have to spend more time with students, as a substitute.

Not only that, higher education is about learning more than just your subject matter. The full “college” experience involves learning all sorts of social and life management skills in a setting very different from secondary education. Societies and clubs are certainly a core part of it – but even students who don’t take a management role in any societies still develop significantly during their time in higher education, in a way largely independent of the specifics of their course.

Across Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick, there are currently about 32,000 purpose-built student units. This need could rise to close to 65,000 units by 2030.

This gets to the core of what will and what won’t change in higher education over the coming years, as a result of the shift online that Covid-19 has brought. Where these more general forms of development are unimportant – especially in part-time courses focused on a particular skill or area – there will be huge pressure for higher education institutions to move online. Where the full lived experience is a key part of the offering – in particular, three to four-year undergraduate degree programmes but also at postgraduate level, online is simply too poor a substitute to replace it wholesale. 

I’ve no doubt that, in a decade, Irish students will be consuming more content online – recorded by lecturers at the world’s best universities – than they do currently. But this will be a key input to, rather than a substitute for, the developmental experience that higher education is and will continue to be.

If higher education is likely to continue to be on-site rather than online, then this has implications for public policy. Student numbers have grown substantially over the past two decades. But, perhaps surprisingly, this is not because of a larger population.

Uninest student res
Global Student Accommodation’s residence on Dublin’s Dominick St, where the group has applied for planning permission to house “tourists or visitors” for the 2020-2021 academic year. Photo: Thomas Hubert

Between 2000 and 2015, the 18-21 year-old cohort actually fell from 266,000 at the turn of the millennium to 220,000 in the mid-2010s. If enrolment rates hadn’t increased significantly from roughly 40 per cent to almost 70 per cent in the same period, local student numbers would have fallen from 110,000 to just over 90,000. Instead, they rose to 155,000, as more than two-thirds of 18-21 year-olds went to higher education.

For the next fifteen years, however, from 2015 until 2030, the college-going age cohort is set to increase substantially. Even if enrolment rates increase no further, the numbers of local 18-21 year-olds in the state-funded college system will rise from 155,000 in 2015 to more than 215,000. But hoping enrolment rates do not further increase seems like an odd national ambition, given the importance of “human capital” in the world economy. An increase in enrolment from 70 per cent to 75 per cent will add a further 15,000 local students into the mix by 2030.

If Ireland’s higher education system was set up in a way where the institutions were given adequate resources to teach extra students, this would be an interesting challenge but largely one policymakers could watch from the sidelines. However, in the 1990s, the Government at the time effectively chose a system where it would pay students’ fees. On its own, this is hardly a bad policy but, combined with two other key features, has been a recipe for chronic underfunding of higher education at a time of extraordinary increases in demand.

International students, paying full fees set by the college, effectively subsidise local students. So the paradox of growing local student numbers is that it also triggers a greater need for international student numbers.

The first additional feature is that the Government unilaterally sets the fees it pays to higher education institutions. If you were the customer and also the price-setter, what would you do? Given this conflict of interest, successive Governments have done what you would expect anyone to do – chosen not to increase the price that they have to pay. Irish students are – bizarrely – loss-making for Irish higher education institutions.

The critical second feature, which effectively trapped higher education institutions in Ireland in an under-resourced system, is that Government sets the pay of those employed by those institutions. Especially during the 2000s, when public sector pay increased substantially, institutions were faced with growing costs, due to rapidly rising wage bills, but without sufficient revenues, as the fees were set by government. Their two solutions were first to increase the registration fee – the €3,000 mentioned by the tweeter above – and, more recently and concentrated in a few universities, attract greater numbers of non-EU students. 

International students, paying full fees set by the college, effectively subsidise local students. So the paradox of growing local student numbers is that it also triggers a greater need for international student numbers. As Irish higher education institutions struggle to cope with greatly increased demand over the next decade, they are likely to turn to one of the few options available to them to help balance the books: recruit greater numbers of students from overseas, especially the US, China and India.

In most countries, greater numbers of international students would be greeted for what it should be: a country succeeding in what is a very high-value add service export. Ireland has always had a somewhat funny relationship with foreign students, however – until recently, the national policy referred to ceilings, rather than targets, for how many foreign students could be in the Irish system. That mentality has finally shifted but a new problem has emerged: where will these students live? 

More student homes would benefit everyone

Perhaps more confusingly, there has been a reluctance to see student accommodation built, not just by prospective neighbours but in many instances by local authorities themselves. If student accommodation is not built, students from “out of town” will typically end up in family homes, sharing with three, four or more other students. Building student homes frees up other housing – which should surely be welcome news in a country so short on housing. And building lots of new student homes pushes down the cost of the existing stock.

Also, without enough student accommodation, fewer students will choose to leave their hometown. Even leaving aside international students, more generally, it hardly seems fair that we require Irish students to go to the college closest to them, regardless of whether it offers the course that best matches their needs, because our housing system is so dysfunctional that they can’t move to where the opportunity is.

In a scenario where Ireland had both a healthy higher education system and a healthy housing system, we would expect something like 60 per cent of international students and 50 per cent of “non-local” students (i.e. Irish but from another county) to live in purpose-built student accommodation – and that “non-local” students would be a rising, rather than falling, share of all students.

Building student homes frees up other housing – which should surely be welcome news in a country so short on housing. And building lots of new student homes pushes down the cost of the existing stock.

Across Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick, there are currently about 32,000 purpose-built student units for the academic year just starting. Realistically, however, the underlying need for student units in those four cities is already above 50,000 and – with the college-age cohort growing and international students needing to grow to offset the costs – this need could rise to close to 65,000 units by 2030. It is in this context that opposition to purpose-built student accommodation must be considered.

Recently, about 6,000 new student units have been built in Dublin and a further 4,000 or so are expected to come online in the next couple of years. These will certainly help close the gap – but are hardly sufficient given the extraordinary increase in student numbers in the first three decades of this century. In Cork, Galway and Limerick, hardly any new student homes have been built in the last five years – despite these three cities collectively having a similar ‘market size’ as Dublin.

Covid-19 will change many things, in higher education as elsewhere in society. Part-time and short-duration professional courses are quite likely to go completely online – and may see a surge in demand as a result. It is also likely to change the content of many degrees and hasten the conversion to ‘flipped classrooms’, where students digest passive content ahead of live sessions. But, as @raychelelel’s tweet shows, it is unlikely to change the ultimately experiential nature of higher education.

Ronan Lyons is Assistant Professor of Economics at Trinity College Dublin and Director of Trinity Research in Social Sciences