Debate: Was abolition of college fees a good idea?
YES: A recent ride in a taxi reassured me that the government decision I spearheaded to abolish fees was the right one.
A quiet Dublin taximan's parting words to me were an embarrassed, muted thanks "for the four children you put through university".
He shyly drove off and I was left wondering what future would have lain ahead for these young Dubliners, if during their third-level student days, Fianna Fail had pulled the rug of free fees from under them.
Probably, I surmised, the taxi- man's girls might not have finished college. But they and their brothers did and all are part of the statistics that proudly show an increased participation of students in third-level education in Ireland.
Worries at the UCD Geary Institute about the absence of a cohort of disadvantaged students availing of the free-fees initiative, among its student body, can be laid to rest.
Happily for all concerned, if this research extended beyond the very welcome ESRI School Leavers' Survey and referred to continuing monitoring of two other interventions introduced by me, working with Drumcondra's Education Research faculty, a truer picture might emerge.
Those students that the Geary Institute are missing are those who will, I hope, benefit from two totally different interventions: Early Start and Breaking the Cycle.
Under the original fees structure, fees were always free to those below an income threshold limit.
The trouble was few finished school and fewer entered the gates of our universities.
I had taught at Cook Street National School, Dublin 8, in the 1960s and was very aware that by 1995 no past pupil of mine had ever walked from Oliver Bond flats down Dame Street and in the gates of Trinity College or indeed any other college.
A much different approach to levelling the playing field for their education was needed.
So while we commissioned the De Buitleir Report to track where the money for third level was being spent, and that report revealed just how much was going on tax relief for the wealthy -- the pub owner not the bar man; the farmer not the farm hand and all those professors in our universities who could claim tax relief for educating their offspring while enjoying free fees as a perk -- Combat Poverty was invited to work with Drumcondra to help establish guidelines to identify where those most disadvantaged could be targeted.
Employment
Research identified few fathers in any kind of employment. The most disadvantaged students were being raised in households where the mother's education was severely limited.
Students who went on to access these specific schemes are still working their way through the school system.
Those pupils who were three years old in 1996 are only now finishing transition year. I do hope that some of these pupils will one day be welcomed into the halls of the Geary Institute.
In the meantime, thousands of others, such as the taximan's children, have become their families' first generation of university graduates; the free fees initiative raised their expectations, changed the mindset toward education for many parents and are returning this investment to the Exchequer because other ESRI research shows that education did improve their life chances.
Niamh Bhreathnach was Minister for Education from 1993 to 1997
- Niamh Bhreathnach and Colm Harmon
Irish Independent
