In addition, several confirmed reports of graduates, transfers, dropouts being able to vote in the preferendum. USI has not adequately addressed how their votes could be separated from students’ votes while maintaining a secret ballot.

“people can afford the fees!!” — typo?

Let me vote (LYIT). Voted for a graduate tax

CIT students aren’t members of USI as CITSU isn’t affiliated to USI.

How can a smart competitive economy grow without enough graduates? Why should students be forced to pay some of their potentially future incomes to unguaranteed bondholders? That is assuming they even get a job. We didn’t vote for ff.

You don’t sound hard-off anyway!

How to pay for better public services and for education (a basic human right)? Raise tax. Simple.

Students, in many cases ARE tax payers, many are mature students who have paid tax most of their lives and the rest will graduate to go on and generally pay more tax than those who decide not to go to college.
Everyone in society benefits from education, it gives us better teachers, doctors, judges, politicians, nurses. Those who benefit directly from education unarguably pay more tax during their lives.
Why are you claiming that the educated don’t “contribute anything themselves”? The people you are talking about over all contribute more than any other sector of society.

Wouldn’t necessarily agree with lecturers being overpaid given their work load. A lot of them put in well over 40 hours a week. But the Presidents are a joke. The President of UCC is on 230,000 a year as of 2010. Thats down from the 280,000 he was on in 2008. Thats an absolute disgrace! Even cutting that 30,000 would put two students through a year in college nearly.

Come on Val, over 40 hrs is nothing, how many of them are actual teaching hours, probably 10 at most. Most people on salary in private sector do far more that that and don’t get 3 months off at summer to think about stuff and write Micky mouse papers. still overpaid compared to our european neighbours.

@ap freely While about 10 hours a week are teaching hours, the other 30 are class prep, lecture notes, test corrections and making tests. I wouldn’t say they waste their time off either. Majority of my lecturers are going for their Doctorates as well as (trying) to teach us

Lecturers are far from overpaid, nor is their timetable solely centred around teaching. Bear in mind that their job is 40% teaching, 60% research. Not to mention all the admin they have to do, and don’t forget that there are PhD students to be supervised and guided along as well. If they really were that overpaid, they wouldn’t be constantly competing for grants and fellowships from research councils such as the IRCHSS now, would they?

Most university staff do not get 3 months off in the summer. Lectures are not the only thing that go on in universities.

Government very much can afford it. Progressive taxation and restructuring of how some colleges are run will be necessary.

The government has found the money to bail out Anglo and the bondholders, to whom we owe nothing; that was private debt that the people of Ireland should not have to repay because private business people took a gamble.

Being able to access education should never be contingent on financial means. To suggest such a system is discrimination of a gross nature. 100% Exchequer Funded is fair to families and to society.

(This vote was still a complete catastrophe, and USI needs a major overhall but that’s another kettle of fish.)

As of 2010 the HEA but the first year drop out rate at 9%. Sounds like a lot but when you consider that the University does not claim fees if the student drops out before October 31st and only claims half fees for those who drop out before January 31st I don’t think the problem is as big as you claim, financially speaking.

As pointed out above the cost in JSA to those not enrolled would be higher than the cost of educating them for the year.

A fairly prominent lecture explained this too our class towards the end of this year. Our colleges are falling down the rankings because they are refusing to throw out their outdated marking schemes. Our college will rarely give someone over 70/80% because there thinking is anything higher than that is professor standard, and clearly a student can’t be of that standard! On the other hand, the US and UK colleges along with many others, have thrown out that system and started marking on actual worth. Its keeping our grades way lower than they actually are as a result and stopping us from competing for the top prizes. Its actually some joke.

Wow, O’Reilly, you have regurgitated what it repeated on RTE perfectly. “current climate” “falling down the rankings” etc, you would make a good government spin doctor!

Do you think it may be possible that Ireland, and much of the rest of Europe’s higher educatin institutes are falling in world ranking because so many recently developed and developing countries have started to establish western-standard institutes?

We are falling because Asia are rising, it has nothing to do with dropping standards, just the standards are rising elsewhere and the demographic is massively increasing.

Hi Ben, Cian from NUIG SU here.

The timing of the preferendum was especially bad for various reasons. Mainly that now is a time when students are unconnected with their campuses due to either being mired in exams or having already finished. This is while USI are criticising the government for holding the referendum during the week as it will disenfranchise students. It would have been far better to hold this in October when colleges will be pulsing with students and SUs can ensure they have an actual mandate.
Plus, timing this now means that the media is even less likely to care, given the importance of the Fiscal Treaty.

As for NUIG’s walk out, it’s important to note that not every delegation had a mandate to vote: delegations such as QUB, UU and NUIG were free voting meaning it was important to give their delegates a chance to hear each side debated. This was one of the most monumental decisions USI can vote on given it would mean a radical policy shift by USI. We felt it was vital to ensure that each option was debated as much as possible. When this was guillotined and the debate was cut off after only 4 speakers we walked out to show our dissatisfaction with how this was being run (we still voted as we checked with the USI Steering Committee that voting was still possible)

In addition, the USI online poll was utterly flawed with many students being unable to vote and other non students being able to. We tried e-voting before in Ireland and it was a dismal failure. This was no exception.

In my mind “teething issues” means “the site went down a few times” or something like that. The reality is the equivalent of the ballot boxes being unsupervised for the entire duration of voting. On a basic levee, e-voting has myriad problems as is – this system had even more.

Ben, you can’t possibly believe the things your saying above; do you?

Having a vote when the majority of students are in exams or finished for the Summer is pathetic. It leaves no time or opportunity for students to be informed. If, as Gary Redmond, keeps cheeping, the USI really does care about what its grassroots members think about the structure of our higher education and funding models, they would not rush through this vote at a time that is completely inconvenient to students. The appalling turnout (5% of USI members voted) reflects this.

That doesn’t even address the fact that the website has XSS vulnerabilities AND alumni and students who had dropped out and were no longer registered students were able to cast votes. The USI has not adequately addressed how these votes were identified and nullified while maintaining a secret ballot.

NUIG’s delegation and some of the QUB delegation left the room after 9A was passed (to end further debate on the issue). This again returns to the fact that USI’s supposed concern for their members’ opinion is remarkably fake. If this issue is so important that it had to be rushed and put to students now, why couldn’t there be proper debate and discussion at Special Congress?

If you can’t see anything wrong with this catastrophe, we are living in parallel realities.