Home students first

I AGREE with Gerald Morgan (Letters, October 22) that more foreign students are not the answer to the university fees crisis. It would be wrong to prioritise wealthy foreign students over our own.

Wealth does not always correlate with brains and enough has already been done to facilitate a foreign presence in our universities (UCD once boasted that around 80% of its staff come from abroad).

To be fair to foreign students, one has to acknowledge the problems in their own countries. In addition to this, non-EU students pay double for increasingly deteriorating standards of tuition. That said, fees should return for those students best able to afford them.

People rarely place value on what is free.

Dr Florence Craven

Maynooth

Co Kildare