Free third-level education has served this country well in the past 13 years. But has it benefited some more than others? Who gained the most from the abolition of fees? And what would happen if they were brought back in?
Remember the boom? One of the catalysts was a decent education. The rate of participation in higher education has increased dramatically since the dark days of the 1970s and this uplift has been evident across all sectors of Irish society.
In 1970 just 5% of the population was educated beyond secondary school; this had risen to an impressive 55% by 2007, which compared favourably with international trends.
The introduction of free secondary education in 1967 followed by the means-tested fee and maintenance grant system one year later (currently providing a degree of assistance to 38% of higher education students) has fuelled this increase.
Following the abolition of university fees in 1995, a slightly stronger increase in the university entrance rate for children of manual workers was observed when compared to that for children of business executives and the members of higher professions.
However, it seems that the bulk of the savings realised may have been channelled by better-off parents into the funding of the exorbitant fees charged by private schools. This is particularly evident in Dublin where the Institute of Education grind school tops the table as the source of entrants for both UCD and Trinity College. And nine of the top 10 feeder schools for both universities are fee-paying.
Thus, though the intention was to remove the bias against less well-off parents, the effect may have been to push the impediment further back into the education system, facilitating discrimination earlier in the process.
Students from less privileged backgrounds are more likely to drop out prior to third-level course completion and are far less likely to gain entry into the higher professional courses such as medicine.
Should the reinstatement of third-level fees proceed, a solution to the skew in the participation rates might be to overhaul the grants system and ring-fence fee income for the purposes of improving standards in primary and secondary schools in underprivileged areas. Recent small-scale initiatives in specific schools have shown dramatic results and would appear to offer a way forward.
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