Attacking grants will shut students out
By Claire O’Sullivan

Saturday, August 18, 2012

ABOUT six months ago, a friend of mine rang me whooping with joy.

She had just been told that out of 200 applicants, she and one other person had been selected to complete a nine-month internship with a local planning authority.

For any planning graduate, securing an internship in a planning office in 2012 Ireland was something akin to a physics graduate having got a job with the Cern team researching the Higgs boson particle.

There really are no graduate planning jobs in this country. The very most that a graduate can hope for is an internship, and most internships don’t even lead to a job. In this girl’s case, this was her second internship.

She had already completed a nine-month stint at a well-regarded state agency where she had excelled, been praised and then waved out the door. The first-class graduate couldn’t have been more grateful though, as work experience in planning is like gold dust in a country where the construction sector barely registers a pulse, and so there’s a glut of planners staring at blank computer screens in council offices nationwide.

She couldn’t contain herself. She had graduated with a first-class honours master’s in planning two years previous and estimated she had filled out hundreds of job applications to no avail. Rejection after rejection came back as she didn’t have sufficient experience.

She hadn’t limited herself to Ireland either. She’d applied for work in the UK too, but most jobs required full membership of the Royal Town Planning Institute and again, that required two years’ work experience.

It appeared there was no winning until this internship was advertised; an internship which paid the princely sum of €50 a week. It was her ticket to a career as it would mean she would build up nearly 18 months in the workplace. However, a few days after being offered the place, she rang again. The joy was gone. Her husband was availing of a back to work enterprise allowance as he’d set up his own business in an effort to get off the dole after losing his job in the construction industry. He was claiming for her as a dependant, and if she was to avail of the internship, they’d have to forfeit €150 a week.

After weeks spent on the phone pleading her case to the Department of Social Welfare, Department of the Environment, and the Department of Jobs and Enterprise, she eventually gave up the ghost and informed the council she couldn’t take up the internship. She was distraught. She couldn’t afford to get work experience. If she relinquished the €150 entitlement , she’d soon be in arrears on her mortgage.

All over this country that same story is being played out every day. Internships are only realistically a solution to graduate unemployment when the intern has somebody else to fund them through the internship. You might just manage it if you’re living at home, can get a part-time job, or are able to squeeze money out of a bank or credit union. If you’re living in the country and need to move to a city and your parents haven’t the bucks, you’re in trouble.

To even get a part-time job asking “would you like fries with that?” you now need to fight off about 40 others. One graduate told the Irish Examiner recently how she had to give up a part-time bar job while completing her internship at a magazine as she had been hauled aside by an editor about not being available for evening events.

“The bottom line about it is that to get any chance of getting a job in this country, your parents have to have enough money to fund you through internship after internship. It’s only after a string of internship that your CV might look half decent. It’s appalling that there are some brilliantly bright people out there who are completely screwed by this internship culture. Where’s the equality of opportunity?” she asked.

While you may argue that the State can’t really control a labour market where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are screaming to work for free, there is another sector of the economy that is entirely controlled by the State and that is third-level education. What is happening there is even worse.

The Union of Students of Ireland is getting increasingly concerned that a two-tier education system is one of the more ghastly side effects of this recession. One of the sneakier cuts in last year’s budget was to postgraduate funding. In 2008, more than 4,900 applied for postgraduate courses. By 2011, this had soared to 6,720 as graduates increasingly saw postgrads and master’s degrees as ano-ther weapon to help them get ahead in the battle for a job.

Now, however, students from poorer backgrounds won’t be able to get their postgraduate studies funded. So, if you’ve done a broad degree like arts, science or even commerce, you will have to find up to €10,000 or €20,000 to pay fees, eat, pay rent, and keep warm while you do your best to make yourself job fit.

Only the children of parents surviving solely on State benefits will be able to have their tuition fees paid — but once again, this is up to a maximum of €6,270. Postgraduate degrees cost up to €10,000.

Somehow they will have to find the remaining several thousand euro and, according to USI, even medical and dentistry students are regularly being turned down for bank loans these days. Ten years ago, they couldn’t be indulged enough by banks anxious to get them on side for when the big bucks started rolling in.

Yesterday, the Department of Education said that a further “limited” number of students who would previously have qualified under the standard grant thresholds “may” qualify to have a €2,000 contribution made towards the costs of their fees; €2,000 is a pittance when it will cost at least €20,000 to fund a postgraduate’s living and fee costs for a year.

And all of this from a Government that is constantly harking on about how our future lies in the smart economy. We’ll be far from smart when our postgraduate figures collapse.

In an effort to offset the hardship these funding changes will bring, our ever-humanitarian Bank of Ireland has brought in a new loan scheme to fund postgraduates. Students will pay interest only during their studies and then a whopping 10,8% interest and capital afterwards.

And so we’ll have another cohort of graduates saddled with tens of thousands of euro of debt that they have to clear in five years. These are the very same students who will then join the internship carousel.

There’s little doubt but that the older generations have shafted the youth of this country. The rank stupidity of the Celtic Tiger has left generations to come saddled with billions of euro of banking debt and deprived them of a functioning jobs market.

Now we are making it increasingly difficult for children from poorer backgrounds to put their State-funded degrees to use. The Labour party might hark on about how free fees have made third-level education accessible to all. That is rubbish.

Yet this is a country that pays children’s allowances to ministers, judges, barristers, and hospital consultants, and funds the undergraduate university fees of their children. When this elite then reach the age of 70, they will be given medical cards so they can attend a GP for free.

Attacking the grant system rather than seeking increased fees from those who can pay will only shut college gates to more children while behind those gates, the standard of our third-level education continues to fall.

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