Thousands of students who are entitled to a grant may still have to pay the €670 student registration fee, it was claimed yesterday by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI).
VECs last week warned that, because of delays in processing grant applications, thousands of students might not receive grant approval in time for the start of college.
USI said that this would force students to pay the charge, although most of them would be refunded subsequently if their grant application proved successful.
Yesterday, the body which represents VECs, the Irish Vocational Education Association (IVEA), said that many VECs had still not received this year's grant application forms from the Department of Education.
The general secretary of the group, Mr Michael Moriarty, said that VECs refused to take the blame for administrative mistakes made by the Department of Education. He explained that VECs could not process applications without the forms.
The president of USI, Mr Colm Jordan, said: "If students do not have proof that they are receiving a grant, they will have to pay the €670 college registration fee regardless of their parents' income.
"When the students have proof that they will be receiving a grant, the money is refunded, but in some cases this can take several months. For example, one mother phoned us up stating that, in a similar situation last year, it was February before she was refunded."
Mr Jordan said that €670 was a considerable sum for any family. "To put it in context, a manual worker would have to work over 112 hours to finance it, or even more if tax is added to the equation."
Meanwhile, the Consumers' Association of Ireland said that the higher-level grants scheme was unfair to many PAYE workers. Its spokesman, Mr Michael Kilcoyne, pointed out that farmers and the self-employed qualified for the majority of grants.
He said that the gross income of PAYE workers was taken into account when their eligibility was tested, whereas farmers and the self-employed were judged on their net income, after business expenses were deducted. He said that this represented a major anomaly.