Harvard boss warns over degree focus

THE head of the world’s leading university has warned against a focus on graduating students with degrees more valuable to the economy at the expense of longer-term benefits.

In a lecture to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, Harvard president Dr Drew Faust said university bosses globally must work to assure their support for what is invaluable is not eclipsed by understandable efforts to promote the valuable. Her comments come as an expert group here finalises its strategic review of Irish higher education, which is expected to push for a focus on providing skilled workers for a knowledge economy.

Dr Faust, who also met with Taoiseach Brian Cowen yesterday, said too narrow a focus on the present can come at the expense of the past and of the long view that has always been higher learning’s special concern. “When we define higher education’s role principally as driving economic development... we risk losing sight of broader questions... that foster the restless scepticism and unbounded curiosity from which our profoundest understandings so often emerge,” she said.