Colleges don’t have enough staff with PhDs to qualify as tech universities

The chances of any colleges becoming technological universities in the next few years look slim because some need to more than double their number of staff holding PhDs.

Applications to become technological universities are being planned by four groups comprising 13 institutes of technology.

However, figures obtained by the Irish Examiner show that only 23% of their combined full-time academics have a PhD, whereas qualification would require 45%.