Emerging higher education strategy in Ireland

Abstract

In Ireland, policies destined to create a reconfigured binary higher education system are evolving; in the coming years institutes of technology may be redesignated as technological universities following a process of voluntary amalgamations and independent reviews against stringent criteria. This overhaul of the sector would satisfy institutions’ ambitions to have their status upgraded, and would underpin national policy to address fragmentation and sustainability issues. Drawing on international literature on mergers in higher education, this paper proposes a distinction between push and pull factors as the drivers for exploration and decision making. These two categories of drivers are reviewed in the context of Irish policy development and are applied to an example of a merger that was effected after the publication of the new National Strategy for Higher Education.