Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 6 February 2025
266. Deputy Conor D. McGuinness asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science the total allocations made by the Higher Education Authority to each of the technological universities, with a per-capita funding figure by number of registered students in each institution in each of the past five years, in tabular form. [3613/25]
Amharc ar fhreagraHigher education institutions (HEIs) are autonomous bodies as set out in legislation and are funded in a variety of ways including state grants, competitive funding, tuition fees, and commercial/private income streams.
The provision of Higher Education funding on an annual basis is part of overall expenditure management and budgetary policy for Government. Investment in Higher Education is not specifically determined on the basis of a ‘per student’ or a ‘per capita’ metric.
The Higher Education Authority (HEA) provides onward capital funding and current funding to funded bodies including Technological Universities under a range of different schemes and programmes on an annual basis. In allocating the available allocations, the HEA have processes in place to disburse the overall funding. For example, recurrent grant funding is allocated through the HEA Recurrent Grant Allocation Model. It is important to note that these processes are utilised to appropriately disburse rather than determine the overall available allocation. Details of the HEA administered annual allocations to funded bodies, across the different schemes and programmes, are available in the HEA's Annual Reports.
In terms of student numbers, the Higher Education Authority gathers data on registered students through its annual Student Records System (SRS) returns. Student number data can be accessed on the HEA website at: hea.ie/statistics/data-for-download-and-visualisations/access-our-data/access-our-data-students/
For the Deputy’s convenience, I have set out at the following link details of the funding allocations made by the HEA to Technological Universities and separately, their student numbers.
Details of the funding allocations made by the HEA to Technological Universities
