Students dropping our because their grant is a couple of months late?

Hyperbole much?

Yes, upon reflection perhaps you’re right. I mean, who needs money really. They can always go for a swim and live off plankton until 2013.

@Rónán – Not necessarily. They might be able to get around their liquidity problems, but grant recipients are also exempted from paying the €2,250 student contribution (the previous ‘registration fee’ – SUSI, or their council, pays the fee on their behalf).

Many colleges don’t allow students who haven’t paid the full registration fee to access the library, or put other fundamental blocks on what they can do on campus. In colleges where courses are semesterised, this means a student might not be able to get hold of their required reading materials before their Christmas exams – and that, for some, could mean dropping out.

This is precisely why Christmas is such an important deadline for processing everything – there are many students who can’t be treated as fully-enrolled until their grant is processed, and they find out whether they might have to cover the €2,250 themselves.

Thanks Gavan,

I’m aware of the details, I was at university not so long ago and also waited until January myself in first year for my first grant payment and the refund of my registration.

I’m not doubting the hardship, I simply don’t accept that someone would give up college over a delayed grant. Rejected, perhaps, delayed no.

A lot of new students enter the system every year, causing a backlog for those new entrants as places are only decided 6 weeks before registration. And now presumably every student has to be reprocessed thought the system, if only to confirm continuation. This was always going to be a downpayment in the first year of a new process.

Its not just 1st years, im in 4th year and they dealing with my application aswell

It’s actually the county/city councils that deal with the grants not the minister. They are an absolute nightmare to deal with and as unhelpful as is humanly possible (in my experience anyway!)

Well Written Ciara and I wish you the very best of luck along with all the students
This is an absolute disgraceful situation and QUINN should step down and as he has not He should be sacked effective immediately

Centralised electronic submission does not imply centralised electronic decision making.

These things still have to be run through one by one, and with electronic submissions there will be errors which need clarification.

The process will bed down over time with feedback. You’ll understand the risks in real-world projects when you finish college, brother ;)

should have hired a project manager that understands targets and dead lines… in the real world a business would not survive at this level of under achieving.

Aye, another layer of bullshit is what it really needs.

Rónán, perhaps more schooling would assist your powers of interpretation. I was referring to the planning process in setting the system up in the first place, as an example of government’s consistent inability to gauge with any degree of accuracy or realism how long their projects will take, the costs involved or the likelihood of their success. I agree with you that such errors are to be expected in a hybrid electronic submission and human judgement system. My point is that this is remarkably poorly planned, and the problems they are experiencing should have been anticipated and allowed for at planning stage or once the deadline passed. Why are they only hiring staff now? Would you roll out a nationwide system as a trial? What’s the point of a smoothly operating data harvesting mechanism if you can’t get the correct info through it, or process it sufficiently quick enough to meet targets you guaranteed at the project’s launch?

Ruairi after 8 years in the software industry I can tell you that it’s commonly accepted knowledge that plans are only valid on the day the they are published. By the end of any project what was done departs far from what was estimated, planned, and budgeted.

Sh1t happens stuff gets dropped and most commonly this amounts to dropping/downgrading reporting and logging mechanisms, as core functionality is given preference among the requirements.

I will concede the point that countrywide roll out was ambitious, but with public sector budgets so tight, a ‘saving’ purported for the program, this was always going to be a one for one swap without luxury budgeting for pilot schemes.

A fresher student would be just as unlikely to have received their grant by now, whether waiting on a decision or waiting for the hags up in fees scholarships and grants to ‘process’ cheques. In first year, despite you having your grant in place, I still waited months for approval instead of them attaching the family.

Also, whether electronic or paper submission, there’s a 35 hour a week jobsworth who hasn’t had deadlines or accountability in their job before now.

Rónán, I’ll try address this point by point. I agree with you on the nature of planning, and its less-than-harmonious relationship with project delivery in industry. Core functionality is indeed given preference. I’m not sure the core functionality of the system as a whole (electronic interface, admin staff, and whoever makes the financial judgement calls) has been delivered. In fact, when contrasted with with what Quinn promised at its launch, a different picture emerges.

Quinn is on record as stating that it’s primary purposes were to eliminate unnecessary student hardship through speedier processing of grant applications and to enact public sector reforms. It clearly has failed on both these issues, SUSI has (albeit temporarily) nearly doubled its workforce to clear the backlog, while the issues of administration of grant applications is now well documented. Now, regardless of whether or not plans can consider all contingencies, this is unacceptable. It constitutes a massive failure in terms of staffing at the very beginning (allowing for the failure to be an inability by existing staff to handle workload), and a failure to react sufficiently quickly when the issue was realised. It’s simply bad management. Just because 1st year students have traditionally had to wait until the following year before payments work doesn’t mean that equalling this dubious achievement constitutes success.

Re: the jobsworth, I completely agree. The blockage within the system flow is not with the electronic system but with the human element. Which means that failure is with the workforce. Again, a planning failure, which should have consequences. SUSI was launched on the premise that 65 people could do the job better than all the county and city councils re: grant application processing. This decision was incorrect, regardless of the so-called unexpected surge in application for college places.

Perhaps subsequent years will be a fairer time to judge this government project. But we as voting citizens have been sold too much snake oil already by previous administrations. We have failed to question the transparency of the tendering process, the methodology behind government selection of programmes for funding, and the budgets assigned to such. Failure brings consequences in every walk of life, and it should be no different here. I am confident that the development of this project was reasonably half-a$$ed, with appropriate results, if not the electronic component, then its interaction with the centralised version of a flawed model. Even a perfect electronic system, on top of a pre-existing process already established as broken, smacks of carts placed before horses.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. :)

Next time I’ll just wait and discuss it over a pint