Cabinet to consider loan schemes for student fees

PARENTS and students may have to wait until the end of the year before they know what form of student fees or loans scheme will be introduced.

Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe is circulating a long-awaited report today to ministerial colleagues outlining various options on possible changes to the free tuition system in place since the mid-1990s.

While one of the five options is to leave things as they are, the minister is known to favour a form of loans system under which students would pay back part of the cost of their third-level education once they begin earning a certain income after graduation.