Rating our colleges - Good, but must do more

A new international rating of the world’s higher education facilities suggests things are not as bad in our colleges and institutes as we might have thought.

The Universitas 21 findings on resources is particularly interesting as we are ranked 12th out of 48 countries, ahead of France, Germany and Israel.

Maybe this finding might bring a new focus on how these resources are managed or allocated.

Ireland was ranked very much in the top half of the league table — if we dare to use that phrase in relation to education — and was rated 16th overall.

These are encouraging figures but do not mean, as the recent Organisational Review Programme for the Department of Education suggested, that we can pretend all is well in how we educate our children.