Funding education - Fees needed to sustain our colleges

TOMORROW morning more than 55,000 young people will get their Leaving Cert results.

A little over half of them hope to go on to college and their results will define whether they may or not; whether they will be accepted into the course of their choice or have to consider another option. No matter what they opt for they will not have to pay college fees this year.

However, if Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe’s mood-setting statements of recent days are anything to go by, they might not finish third-level education without having to pay some sort of a charge.

Changing economic circumstances for the country, and disastrous economic circumstances for the colleges, have conspired to re-open the annual debate that was last seriously visited five years ago when the then Education Minister Noel Dempsey proposed a fee system based largely on the Australian model.

All Australian graduates are funded by a state loan, which they repay once their income passes a certain threshold.

Though four years have passed since the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on higher education in Ireland recommended the reintroduction of fees, political prerogatives — and our damaging aversion to hard, real-world decisions — ensured that our third-level colleges remain fee-free and hugely under-funded.

Strangely, a lot of that political pressure came from the Progressive Democrats, who seem quite happy to have some of us pay for health services but not for education.

Of course, in a typical Irish solution to an Irish conundrum, some students pay fees.

The annual charge to non-EU citizens studying medicine is approximately €27,000. The newly established graduate entry medical degrees cost about €42,000. A High Court challenge to this system by an Irish person who could not secure a place in medicine was rejected, as was that person’s offer to pay the relevant fees to get a place.

Those opposed to fees will argue that they would exclude those who cannot afford them. This is a red herring of the worst, self-serving variety.

Any proposal to reintroduce fees must be, as Mr O’Keeffe has intimated, counterbalanced with a fair, easily accessed, generous, inflation-related and ring-fenced scheme that will ensure that those who genuinely cannot afford to pay are supported and encouraged to go to college.

Despite a funding shortage there has been a significant improvement in performance by a number of our universities in recent years.

Trinity jumped from 78th to 53rd place on the most recent global list. UCD (219th to 177th) and UCC (386th to 286th) also improved their rating. These improvements are remarkable as it was achieved against the backdrop of significant restructuring and inadequate funding. The 3% pay roll cut makes it unlikely that improvement can continue.

To put things in context, Harvard, considered the world’s finest university, spends approximately €22.7 billion each year. Our entire third-level system costs less than €2bn.

And it is not as if we have a principled aversion to paying for education. Record numbers of Leaving Cert students are taking private grinds. Charges start at about €40 an hour and almost 70% of students take grinds, compared to just over 50% a decade ago.

Many more have moved from perfectly good state schools to private schools in the belief that fee schools offer an advantage.

Over recent years we have been seduced into imagining that the State can provide everything. Obviously it cannot.

We can waste time debating the inevitable or face the reality that if our colleges are to be as good as they must be they need more money and that will have to come through tuition fees. We might like to sustain the wonderful notion of free education but our global competitors have recognised the advantage a top class education confers and are prepared to pay for it. We cannot afford to do anything less.

We can’t afford to be delusional about this for much longer. After all the benefits accrued from a higher education are largely private so the costs should be private too. The only issues are what shape the fees structure will take and the income threshold at which fees kick in.

Let that discussion begin and be resolved quickly because we face far greater and potentially more expensive challenges.