Date: Thursday 28 May 2026
Time: 16:30 to 18:00
Location: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Event Description:
Talk by Professor Gwilym Croucher, Deputy Director, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne.
Respondent: Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates & Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin.
Higher education in many developed countries, including Ireland, has seen a significant decline in public investment in the early twenty-first century and a growing trend towards increased student fees, allied to greater philanthropic and/or private funding of higher education institutions. A sharp decline in public investment in Irish higher education is one of the aftershocks of the economic crash but the resulting funding gap has never been addressed in a coherent or consistent way, despite multiple official reports highlighting the scale of underfunding of higher education (Cassells, 2016) and a pervasive rhetoric around the importance of higher education in serving the knowledge based economy.
The seminar encompasses both the endemic crisis in public funding for higher education in Ireland and wider international comparisons drawn from other English speaking HE systems. Our guest speaker, Prof Gwilym Croucher (University of Melbourne) will explore the funding of higher education from an international dimension, considering the impact of recent policy developments in Australia.
Further information is available on the School of Education website here.