Third-level fees protest: perhaps it's time to pay up?

Yesterday saw an estimated 40,000 people take to the streets protest against Government plans to increase registration fees for university students.  Some protesters staged a sit-in at the Department of Finance offices and others attempted a sit-down protest outside the Dail (the Irish parliament).

In the latter two instances there were scuffles with heavy-handed police, which resulted in several protesters being injured, including one who had his “head stamped on” according to a Socialist Workers Party spokesperson. Two protesters were charged; one with criminal damage and another with breach of the peace.  No gardai were charged, to the best of my knowledge.

All that aside, however, this is a difficult one for me.   While it is good to see some form of anger and protest on Irish streets,  it is perhaps predictable that such a protest should come from one of the more privileged sections of Irish society.

When third-level fees were abolished back in 1996, it was trumpeted as a move that would open up third-level education to the disadvantaged.   It did no such thing.   Instead it provided a subsidy for middle-class parents to send their kids to college for free… even when they had paid privately for their second-level education.  The abolition was universal and made no distinction with regard to socio-economic background or income.

A report by Dr Kevin Denny, in May of this year, found that (summary by Karlin Lillington, Irish Times, July 30th):    “..while all taxpayers, including those on lower income, end up paying for free education for third-level students, it is the children of the better off who literally cash in, getting their ticket to a better future and a higher income for free. Meanwhile, disadvantaged students still enter third level education at the same dismally low levels."

The crux of the issue being, of course, that “students from lower-income backgrounds who qualified for university would have been eligible for a fees grant and in some cases, a maintenance grant”.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, president of Dublin City University for ten years up until last July, also dismissed the supposed universal benefit of “free” third-level education in an Irish Times article (May 18th 2010) entitled “The education system fails those we most need to help.”

Prondzynski pointed out that   “between 1998 and 2004 participation levels of those from a ‘non-manual background’ (the lowest social-economic grouping) actually fell by three percentage points.”      He put the third-level participation level in areas close to DCU, such as Finglas and Ballymun, at “somewhere between 5 and 7 per cent”, with a continued decline among those from “non-manual, skilled manual and semi-skilled backgrounds”.

To go back to Denny’s report, its conclusion was that access to third-level education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds must be addressed at secondary level (and I should imagine, well before that, at primary), one of the points being:    “A clear policy implication of this paper is that attempts to tackle inequalities in university access that do not address these performance differences at the Leaving Certificate won’t solve the problem.”

In short, the abolition of fees has done little to address educational disadvanage.  Also, “free” third-level education is nothing of the sort -  someone has to pay for it.

Given the coming cuts will, no doubt, be felt most keenly by the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, perhaps it is not unreasonable to ask the better-off to put their hands in their pockets and pay for their offsprings' education?

Full Denny report here

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