Martina Devlin: Limit access to college through fees and all of society will lose
I CAN'T honestly say my student years were the glory days but they were a formative period: useful, enlightening, conducive to maturity and life enhancing -- sometimes even because of what I learned in the lecture halls.
This time apart between school and work was an exceptional apprenticeship for life, and it gave weight to two essential arts: the need to be open and the value of independent thought. Those arts are not necessarily taught in the classroom, with its emphasis on rote learning. Nor are they automatically prized in every workplace. But they are valuable skills and third-level institutes foster them.
During the civic unrest in London, what came home most powerfully to me was how many of the rioters had no expectation of social mobility. Society needs to make that aspiration a possibility, because the absence of hope leaves a scar.
Free access to third-level education offers the best prospect of social mobility. The lecture hall has no velvet-roped VIP section. Where financial means prove no hindrance to admission, students from all walks of life rub shoulders as equals on campus. Obviously students from affluent socio-economic groups are more likely to progress to university; but once through the gates, family background becomes less relevant.
I was lucky enough to have a grant for university covering fees and subsistence. I have read various academic papers weighing up whether financial assistance is really a decisive factor in propelling people from my background (blue collar) into university -- the academics seem divided -- but I genuinely doubt if I could have reached third level without it.
Did university change my life? Well, let me put it this way: it gave me options. Those people rioting in London probably don't have a wealth of career or lifestyle choices.
Here in Ireland, almost 58,000 students learnt yesterday how they fared in the Leaving Cert, and last night the partying was under way. Amid the euphoria of individual pass rates and the anxiety about general maths failure rates, it would be reassuring to believe every bright young person could win a third-level place irrespective of means.
But the signs are that fees by another name are on the way. Call them a registration cost, call them a student services' charge, but this is a levy from an administration vigilant for additional ways to tax its population, in view of a 2011 exchequer deficit of €17.7bn.
Charges are already creeping upwards. The registration fee was €900, then €1,500, and has now risen to €2,000 for 2011-12. It is supposed to cover student services and examinations, but Trinity College Dublin last year admitted using some of the money for costs associated with animal testing, while other university heads said some library expenses were taken from it.
It is only 16 years since an Irish government had the foresight, and yes, the courage, to introduce free fees. Tuition charges for fulltime undergraduates were halved and subsequently abolished, and universities received instead a block grant. A 1995 white paper said: "These decisions . . . remove important financial and psychological barriers to participation at third level."
Those barriers are now in the process of being erected again. If fees were eliminated to widen access, then any reintroduction would restrict access. A Martian casting one of its multiple eyes over Irish society would be entitled to conclude that we are divided enough already, without creating more causes for alienation.
Hikes to registration fees are our way of telling young people: we screwed up, now you have to pay.
While this €2,000 represents a small proportion of what it costs to provide college education per student, education is surely a sector that needs to be nurtured. The future hinges on it.
So far, the charges are relatively low. In Britain, universities can price their services at up to £9,000 (€10,300) a year from autumn 2012. We are far from that level, nor are we anywhere near the US model where students can be saddled with debts for several decades.
But resistance to fees has been watered down, with talk of high-earners having their children's education subsidised by people of humbler means, and complaints about graduates swanning off once the taxpayer has picked up the bill for their expensive degrees. More graduates would stay at home if they had a chance of a job, however.
Limiting access to third-level education shrinks the talent pool in Irish life. All society is the loser by that. It also stifles social mobility -- a swathe of the community with something to contribute is excluded. And that can lead to disaffection and social unrest, as we saw on our TV screens recently.
The ideal is free fees for all because it enshrines an important democratic principle: education is a right and not a privilege. Realistically, however, the books won't balance. Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has fortunately ruled out a student-loan scheme, but less happily indicates another increase in the student contribution is probable.
In which case, we should means-test it and set the bar at affordability, not exclusion. Grants ought to be offered with no financial strings attached, though we might insist a student should work in Ireland for a number of years before emigrating, provided jobs are available in the relevant field.
And let's not forget that many parents make a significant contribution by subsidising their college-age children via living costs, estimated by the Union of Students in Ireland at €7,700 a year apart from registration fees.
Earlier I described college as a place that prioritises thinking time, but another lifelong asset to be acquired there is friendship.
One of my best friends is a woman I met during our first day on campus.
Last Tuesday night I collected her from Beauchamps, her high-powered corporate law firm overlooking the Liffey, and we had a catch-up dinner in Dublin city centre.
She sat opposite me, every inch the successful urban professional, but in my eyes she remains interchangeable with the 17-going-on-18-year-old girl from Athlone who was just as nervous and excited as me, back in the day.
We didn't know what life held -- but we had the most valuable of all commodities. We had hope.
Irish Independent
