Education fees - Problems don’t begin at third-level

THE question of fees for third-level education has reared its head again.

It has attracted the predictable responses from the Opposition parties and the Union of Students of Ireland (USI), as it did when Education Minister Noel Dempsey floated the idea last year.

A threat from the junior partners in Government, the Progressive Democrats, halted the proposal in its tracks at that stage, and presumably the party is still against the idea.

This time the proposal to re-introduce college fees is contained in a review carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on behalf of the Government.

It would seem rather perplexing that the issue is being regurgitated once more, this time with the weight of a body such as the OECD to lend weight to a proposal most people thought had been settled.

It argues that abolition of the fees nine years ago has not widened the social spread of the backgrounds of the student body, but that an appropriate fees policy would, if allied to a student finance system.

The proposal should be read in the context of another report produced by the OECD earlier this week, which showed that Ireland was practically at the bottom of league of about 30 countries in relation to what it spends on education.

At all levels - primary, secondary and third-level - this country’s expenditure on education was embarrassingly low and in contrast with almost every other country surveyed.

Only the Slovak Republic - one of the poorest of the countries to recently accede to the European Union - spends less per second-level student as a proportion of national income than Ireland.

That report even prompted Mr Dempsey to admit more money has to be spent on primary schools.

Possibly, the lack of investment at this fundamental level, might help to explain to some extent why pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds have not gravitated significantly towards third-level education in a free fees culture.

It is difficult to see how the introduction of fees at third-level will rectify that situation.

What would help that situation would be a significant level of investment in education to bring the country way up the ladder from its abysmally low ranking in the international league.

Doubtless, this latest OECD report will re-open the fees debate once more, and while this in itself is no bad thing, it should not be solely about the tertiary system, and the merits, or otherwise, of a ‘study now, pay later’, scheme.

However, if this review is concerned about the inequitable social mix at third level, the re-introduction of fees will hardly resolve the issue.