Just as we adjourned on the last occasion, I was speaking about university entrance. I held that the figures suggested that there was not nearly as much ground for complaint about entrance students as is generally thought. I have firsthand information and knowledge about University College, Cork. About 20 out of every 100 students who enter the college eventually leave without a degree. That is a very reasonable proportion and one that is quite comparable to figures anywhere in the world. Of that 20, practically all of them, at least 19 have failed by the end of their first year. In other words, the first year examination should be sufficiently exacting and sufficiently precise to distinguish between those capable of going on to their degree and those who are not. I claim that such was the case in University College, Cork, and that it should prevail in any university anywhere.
There is no excuse for a system that lets students get beyond the first year and eventually wind up and drop out. Senator FitzGerald challenged me on this and suggested that University College, Dublin, have 30 per cent failures between those passing the first year examination and those getting the final degree. I have pleasure in giving the actual statistics of the degree examination results in University College, Cork, in respect of the past year. For the BA general examination, 161 students sat for it in June and 132 passed. Then 34 did the examination in the autumn and 27 passed. In addition, in the autumn, there were 48 who presented themselves for honours and all were successful: some got honours but all passed. That means that, out of a total of 218 students sitting for the BA general examination, 207 passed, seven failed and four were absent. In other words, there was a failure rate of less than three in 100 which is excellent and is in complete contrast to the figure quoted by Senator FitzGerald.
The same picture prevails for the BSc examination. Out of a total, between pass and honours, of 83 students presenting themselves, 75 were successful. The failure rate there was eight per cent. Senators may take it for granted that, of that eight per cent, one or two psychological upsets or something else may have been responsible. I would say that most of them repeated it in the following year with a very high probability of getting through. In other words, that is adequate testimony to the fact that there is nothing wrong with the selection system operated by the university on the first year examination results.
The same picture prevails for the commerce examinations. Of the 64 candidates who presented themselves in the summer, 62 passed and the two who failed got through in the autumn.
Of the 39 candidates who presented themselves for the civil engineering examination, 36 passed and, of the candidates who presented themselves for the electrical engineering examination, 14 presented themselves and 14 passed. There was nobody to suggest that our degree is inferior to that granted by any institution in Dublin, Galway, England or elsewhere. With our limited resources, we stand over our results. We hold this up as an example of what a small institution, small in numbers but bound together by a community spirit, can achieve. If the State could finance it, I think institutions of the order of 2,000 persons would be much nearer to the ideal type of community and the academic spirit than institutions of 10,000 or 12,000 persons.
There is a great deal of confused thinking that there are many outside who would be able to undertake a university degree course and obtain a degree. There is a suggestion that, by not being able to follow a course, they are in some way or other being victimised. We cannot rule on that until we see their subsequent contribution to this community and how they have developed.
By and large, we do not want to end up as a community of university graduates and nobody else. However, it does seem that we need to be careful of the thinking which is to the effect that, because there are so many outside who are undoubtedly capable of reaching a university degree standard, there must be some within who are not entitled to be there and who are there solely due to some financial standing of their parents or otherwise.
The figures I have given show that, of every 100 students entering University College, Cork, 80 of them, by their performance, have confirmed their right to be there. The 20 per cent who failed in the first year failed to make the grade. However, if we examine that 20 per cent we shall find that at least half of them failed due to reasons other than academic reasons. They may not have had the industry, the aptitude or the application necessary to make a success of independent study at university level. Perhaps the other ten probably failed because they had not the necessary intellectual ability. It is a very difficult job to tease out that ten from every 100 and ensure that you are not teasing out those who do not make the grade and who do not show a spectacular performance between their secondary school and university performance afterwards. This absolute computer-like precision in selection is not one that is likely to be achieved anyway as long as human beings are as complex as they are and until they are computer-created and computer-directed. Otherwise, your mathematical selection is meaningless.
There is the question of career guidance. There is a great difference between career guidance in this country and career guidance in big economies like England and America where the aim is to select students or to select the best possible line into which to put them. But here parents and students looking for career guidance are not looking for precision in specific career guidance but are looking for crystal-gazing on the part of the adviser. The students want to know what they will do now so that in four or five years when they have got their qualifications they will be able to get a job in Ireland. That is the type of crystal-gazing that is asked for.
That is the most important part of career guidance. By all means have career guidance but at all levels. At national and Government level our task is to fit the students into our economy and to ensure that at all levels we have sufficiently well-trained people capable of making a maximum contribution to the development of our economy in that way. Otherwise, we will wind up with a totally unbalanced economy—one that is incapable of providing the type of educational structure for which we all wish.
There are many demanding positions that are apparently frowned on at present. There is technician training where working with your hands is regarded as somewhat inferior to pushing a pen. Yet, our economy depends on the people who work with their hands. Therefore, I hold that the equality we should seek for as a nation is equality of livelihood for all our young people so that for commensurate ability and commensurate training they get a commensurate return for their work. The young lad who finishes school at 17 and decides to train as a skilled technician and then does a period of four to five years apprenticeship involving night classes, examinations and so on, by the time he reaches 22 and is finally qualified he has put as much effort into his work as the person who has the same intellectual ability and gets a degree. They are comparable: they are tending to be comparable at present.
Secondly, the fact that a young man takes one stream rather than the other is not of great moment but what is important is that there are sufficient going into both streams to ensure that our economy is serviced.
There is the question of staffing opportunities in our universities. We can paint an almost tear-jerking picture of the lack of facilities in our universities compared with similar institutions elsewhere. We have only to look at Queen's University to turn green with envy. Per 100 students, they have at least twice as much grant income to spend on training as we have got. Therefore, it is a tribute to our students and staffs that our results are still as good if not better than those turned out by Queen's and similar institutions elsewhere.
Of course, that cannot continue indefinitely and once we slide we shall carry on sliding. In this respect our university staffs are giving a return to the community which is second to none in terms of the top-class work they are doing. Is there any factory anywhere in this country in which any group of workers can say they are turning out a product even half as good? I wish there was because it would be a tremendous boost to the economy. The universities and the much-maligned secondary schools are the only places where such a top-class product is being turned out. It is sad to think that those who have been giving most to the community, especially the religious orders and the devoted teachers in our secondary schools, are the butts of all fashionable, armchair criticism. It is a pity that these staffs should suffer because of the deficiencies in an inadequately endowed system during the past four or five years. They have been struggling for years to make the best of that system.
Increased personal allowances to students by way of scholarships and grants are urgently needed as well as increased expenditure on staff, and laboratories and libraries for students if we are to catch up on the standards at Queen's and elsewhere. Our expenditure must be doubled and the suggestion that it should be doubled is not as alarming as it sounds. It cannot be done overnight. What is required on the part of the Government is a sevenyear or even a ten-year policy for closing the gap. At the same time, increased student numbers will have to be provided for on a pro rata basis. This closing of the gap will also require the doubling of present staff during the next seven or ten years.
That is really the most difficult task. Money will put up buildings—they can be put up in two, three or four years —but money does not provide staff. Staff in the numbers we need have to be planned for long in advance and our honours students have to be nurtured carefully through post-graduate schools as the source of our future staff members. That is a seven-year to ten-year project. Many of our university departments are doing that with great success but in the past far too much dependence has had to be placed on institutions in England and America where they are only too pleased to take our good post-graduate students and give them full facilities for Ph. D. studies with very adequate grants. Many of our students have no difficulty in getting into top-class American institutions in competition with the best in the world. These institutions in many cases give them grants of about 3,500 dollars— in the region of £1,400—and there are no strings attached. Our difficulty is that once our students go abroad and stay three or four years it is very hard to get them back.
Therefore, our losses are heavy. They would be much less if we could develop our own Ph.D schools. The students could be allowed to go abroad for a year of post-doctorate studies, to England, France or America. In such a situation our students would be more certain to come back and our university departments, in facing the task of creating these schools, would flourish and develop themselves, rendering themselves and the community much greater service. It is urgently necessary that funds should be made available to enable our universities to be just as free in providing research fellowships for students capable of going for the Ph.D as our competitors in England and America. It is the least we owe to our good students and it is the most prudent investment we can make in university education.
I got a thick envelope from the Department of Education two days ago. It contained 50 application forms for post-doctorate fellowships and the amount available was £1,000 a year, rising to £1,400 or £1,500. It should be well known to the authorities that Ph.D graduates do not accept posts like that. What we want is more money put into Ph.D training. It is not books, bricks or mortar we require. Our first priority is human resources. I agree that the Government's efforts in regard to the regional colleges are laudable. They will open in 1969 but where will the staff come from?
Why not wake up to the facts and provide the money for that? We do not want our staff bodies peopled by members with inferior training whom we would have to put up with during the rest of their lives and, therefore, the regional technical colleges would be blighted from the start. We need staff with ability and that is why I say all our planning to date has been neglectful of the necessity for long-term development of our human resources.
It goes without saying that in our universities as well as in institutions elsewhere the only standard should be one of academic excellence. That should be the only criterion and it is a pity we give such lip-service to the matter. We must have excellence if we are to keep our place and the university first of all has a duty to scholarship if it is to maintain international prestige. That is not pretentiousness. It is something we cannot dispense with. Our members in all departments are well up with what is happening elsewhere but they have to contend with a lot of deadwood in our university courses. The university courses are chock-full of deadwood but so are university courses everywhere in the world. It is only the relentless drive and enthusiasm of research-orientated staff members that give the impetus to cut out this deadwood. You have to cut it out because new material is pressing to move in and you must make way for it. That is why the university has to insist on scholarships. It is not for prestige reasons but solely for the mundane reason of doing a good job for the university students and for the community.
While doing that there is no reason why research in the university should not, as far as possible, and without undue compulsion, be linked to the problems of the country. In other words, research as far as possible, and where practical, should have a certain applied flavour. That means a research worker should take some time out in his research to see whether this can be applied to anything in this country. Can it make a contribution? The resulting community appreciation is perhaps the most rewarding and acceptable factor in his work.
Universities depend so much on public finance, especially in this country, that, above all, we have got to see to our public relations and ensure that public relations can be established in regard to the university through the members of its staff who are doing research and who know what the community's problems are. This should be especially so in regard to research in the field of economic and social science and those which are intimately linked with the problems of the community.
Again, the universities can make a big contribution to the machinery of government by providing a pool of trained people that the Government can call on very quickly and find easily for a three-months, a six-months or maybe a year's secondment to special problems within Government Departments or provide personnel for employment on a two-year or a three-year secondment basis in Civil Service departments. It is only in that way will we succeed in modernising and vitalising our Civil Service and tying it in with all the technical abilities and the technical information which we have got in the country. Likewise, I would dearly love to see a regular practice by which people in the Civil Service, graduates within the Department, every four or five years would be able to get six months off to go to the university to study some branch or subject which appeals to them on something arising directly out of their work in the Civil Service during the previous years. If we could achieve that we would have a happy combined unity between the Civil Service and the universities which would be of great benefit to the community. There would then be less misunderstanding and we would have much more confidence.
We have in the university structure of the future something which has been adverted to very much today. I refer to the excellent publication by the Staff Association in UCD in relation to which I find myself, I could say, 100 per cent in agreement. They have done an excellent job by putting their views down so clearly, so cogently and so courageously. This sets a very fine example. The place of service teaching figures quite largely. I consider this is an asset of our organisation which requires considerable study because when service teaching is properly organised the personnel concerned should feel as much if not more committed to the Department being serviced as the parent Department. If you take mathematics or applied mathematics you will find that the job here is to ensure that the highest mathematical skill is made available to the Department being serviced. The members in that Department are encouraged to use those mathematical skills. That type of research is experimental work. That is the most profitable and the least costly type of research work which we can engage in our experimental Department.
Everybody knows that the cost of modern laboratory facilities is astronomical. They have got such laboratories in England and America. Their laboratories are much bigger than ours. When you see them you almost lose heart. They have very big and well-equipped laboratories with all forms of attendance, research workers and teams working in them. That is research on the American model, with which we can never hope to compete. The individual matters here. The individual matters when it comes to experimental work which requires a good deal of mathematical reasoning, backed up by experiments and aided by the computer. All three count and as good a job can be done here as anywhere else in the world. Our computers are smaller here than elsewhere, but they will get the job done in a slightly longer time. However, the time factor does not matter. It is the mathematical thinking which is required in analysing and so on. That is where the individual counts.
I should like to see all our efforts put into this. It is the only place where we can compete. We certainly can compete there. The big laboratories will never supersede the individual research worker. I would suggest that we should be very careful that servicing Departments do a job of servicing which does not stop until the full consultant service is available right to the top and the person concerned is integrated with that Department. It is not for the aggrandisement of the parent Department.
That brings me again to emphasise the place of the computer in our university structure of the future and in our regional colleges of technology because as I pointed out it is both the most modern instrument available to us and by far the outstanding scientific and technical achievement of the past two decades which is only just flowering now and by the standard of the cost of experimental work it is very inexpensive. It is also a task where the individual person matters. We can compete there; therefore, let us go to it and let us develop our computer training to the fullest. It also means that in the future the social sciences, the biological sciences and the medical sciences, in fact all science will have to become more and more computer-orientated, computer-based and capable of using the computer. Therefore, it means that these subjects should no longer be looked on as the domain of those who have not got honours leaving maths which would enable them to get into the decent profession of engineering. It means that in the future our mathematical talent will have to be dispersed between the different disciplines and if I were to do any crystal-gazing here I would suggest that in 20 years' time the biggest change we will observe will be that at that stage the social sciences, economic sciences, et cetera, will have their quota of people with mathematical brains and they will be in full competition with engineering faculties for those people.
Again, of course, on that topic we cannot afford in this country the waste of talent among the lady students in the generally-held myth that girls cannot do maths. That is all nonsense. It has been shown to be so in England, in America, in Russia, where at least one-third of all the students in highly mathematical groups are lady students. I feel that in this country we must deliberately go out to get rid of that myth and to attract lady students into our schools, especially our schools of applied mathematics and computer science. They have a special talent that equips them in those lines and it is a type of work which should be most congenial to ladies. I appeal for more consideration of this.
We come now to the question of our provincial colleges. What of them? They seem to be forgotten and neglected in the turmoil and the concentration on the merger in Dublin. Perhaps we will hear an objection in the background saying: "That is not so. Have the Government not said they are going to get all sorts of things." I for one cannot see, and this view is shared by my colleagues, any real planning or thinking done on the future of Cork and Galway. The figures I have given show that, in fact, we are doing a much more efficient training job with our students between first year and degree level than the larger institution here is capable of doing. We are doing a very good job I am proud to say in that regard and the figures bear me out. I have endeavoured to get figures but I have not got them with finality on the question of the percentage of the graduates turned out by the colleges here who remain in this country and work in this country. The figures I have got suggest that per 1,000 graduates turned out Cork and Galway have a far higher percentage remaining within the country than UCD.
It is hard to get figures for Trinity because there has been such a large foreign student element in Trinity numbers up to this. Therefore, I have not got figures for Trinity. However, it definitely means that the atmosphere of the smaller university, the atmosphere of being away from the capital city does get the students thinking much more in terms of making a livelihood at home, accepting the challenge of whatever job comes up at home and staying here. That is a very important factor because we do not want more of our graduates being exported than necessary. We want them manning our industries and manning every position here where they can contribute to the national economy. I hope we will be able to get more precise figures on that but the present figures suggest that there is an overwhelming difference in that regard between the provincial schools and the one based in the capital city.
If that is the case it is a real reason why the Government should show special concern for the development of what will be the independent universities in Cork and Galway because I feel that we face the fact that as events have turned out here there is nothing for it but independence. The National University is dead, much as we regret its passing. Indeed, I might say that a great deal of the merit in Cork and Galway is due to the fact that the National University prevented us from becoming provincialised, and very many of our past appointments have been due to the intervention of the National University which very often upset local appointments.
