Maynooth University's new undergraduate curriculum was cited as a best practice model for all Irish Universities in a recent Irish Times opinion piece by Professor Frances Ruane, director of the Economic and Social Research Institute and a former member of the Higher Education Authority
"......This may be the moment where the Irish university sector should begin to move systematically to a much broader entry system, such as that operating in the US, where most students enter the single faculty of arts and sciences, majoring in one or at most two disciplines at the end of four years. This change would require more than simply a narrowing of options in the CAO. It is much more akin to the scale of change which Maynooth University plans to implement in 2016, as reported in this newspaper on March 4th. Maynooth is proposing to halve the number of choice offerings and to become the first Irish university to offer the US-type broad entry into arts and sciences.
This broader setting allows students to explore a whole new range of subject options and to discover their preferred direction and real aptitudes after and not before they enter third-level education. The logic is that, post-entry, they must surely have a better chance of finding the right course combination.........In the case of the universities, is it time for more of them to adopt the type of approach planned by Maynooth?"
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