Disadvantaged students face array of obstacles

THE RECENT REPORT by the Equality Studies Centre in UCD on Social Class, Inequality and Higher Education, came to a depressing conclusion. Actually, it contained a number of depressing conclusions, along with an array of suggestions for how the system might be improved to create greater access to higher education from disadvantaged areas.

The report concluded that it would be "impossible to have substantive equality in education without having greater economic equality between different social groups in society". In the absence of that equality, it noted, the greatest single obstacle to disadvantaged students entering higher education was financial; thus it called for grant increases and higher levels of financial support.

It also identified social, cultural and educational barriers to access, including negative perceptions of third-level colleges and poor access to information on third level. The researchers encountered second-level students who had never even heard of the points system.

The report comes at the end of a month of intense activity by third-level colleges in the area of addressing the problems of disadvantaged students. In mid-November, the DIT hosted a major conference on third-level institutes and the local community. Then DCU announced that it proposed to set aside 50 places each year outside the CAO/CAS system, building on the work already done in Ballymun under the BITE initiative. This was followed by the publication of the UCD report and the announcement that the university intended to set aside 2 per cent of places in each faculty at first-year level for disadvantaged students, once again outside the CAO/CAS system.

One of the authors of the UCD report, Kathleen Lynch, said a full review of the system was also needed, since disadvantaged students could not compete on an equal basis against better-off students from schools with greater resources under the current system.

Earlier this year, a confidential report drawn up for the country's seven universities concluded that the points system was the fairest way available for choosing which young people go to college. Yet it went on to consider proposals for "affirmative action" to increase third-level participation by young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. One proposal was the creation of 500 additional reserved places, to be filled at lower points levels outside the CAO system.

But if the points system is the fairest way to select students, then why do disadvantaged students need to be brought in by side-stepping the system entirely? The implicit answer appears to be that the points system is the fairest way of selecting non-disadvantaged students but, frankly, a bit of a failure for students from poorer backgrounds.

The conclusions of last week's report by the UCD Equality Studies Centre appear to support this view, as do statistics from both the Higher Education Authority (see table) and local partnership bodies.

According to the Northside Partnership, a local development company based in north Dublin, fewer than 7 per cent of college-age students in its area took up their third-level courses in 1994, compared with 57 per cent in Dublin 14, on the southside.

The Department of Education has forced all of the universities to examine their role in redressing this imbalance, if (they were not already doing so, but problems remain for those hoping to progress to third level.

"It isn't a level playing pitch," says Pat O'Connor, principal of St Enda's Community School in Limerick and one of the key movers behind the Limerick Community-Based Education Initiative, founded in 1990 to encourage greater participation at third-level by people in its target parish of Southill.

Since 1990, 66 students have completed courses of higher education or are on target to complete them in an area where only one or two pupils might previously have gone on to third level each year. In addition, the scheme has brought up the general pass rate of all students in the parish, through study courses assisted by third-level students, all at a cost of less than £30,000 per year.

"There's a difference in the exposure to language and culture," says O'Connor, who observes that second-level students from upper-middle-class backgrounds studying a continental language will usually be able to visit the country in question. "Then there's the whole area of motivation, financial support and expectations, and all of these things come together to make an uneven playing pitch."

The current CAO system is, he says, "the best we can get for the middle classes, with all the educational advantages that implies".

USI, along with a number of other students' unions and organisations, has also been active in addressing this question. The students' union in the National College of Industrial Relations hosted a seminar with USI to examine ways in which third-level students could act as links between third-level colleges and schools in disadvantaged areas. The Limerick initiative was one of the models proposed.

"We do believe that there have to be affirmative action programmes to bring in students from disadvantaged backgrounds," says Malcolm Byrne, USI's education officer. "I think the points system is `brutal but fair', but it's the education system itself that's at fault."

While the Department of Education has introduced a range of initiatives at primary and second-level to encourage continued participation in education and improve opportunities, the UCD report and the experience of teachers on the ground suggest that more needs to be done.