We need to support our students – not throw them into debt

I represent 17,000 students in Trinity this year in our students union. There are moments when you witness how difficult it can be to be a student in Ireland.

I’ve had students come to my office asking for food to keep going for a couple more days. We’ve seen students who have been ripped off by landlords coming in to ask if we have any rooms on offer for them. We give out small loans as well. I was a class representative in first year, and I saw a friend of mine scraping 10 cent together to afford a chicken fillet roll.

Higher education has been, until recently, quite low on the list of priorities for the Irish government.

While cuts were made in recession, we are now, as Fine Gael reminds us, back in recovery mode. Meanwhile, the Susi grants provide only a third of the cost of living in Dublin, teaching assistants are stretched beyond capacity, and there is still a very low participation rate in higher education in some areas of the country.

The higher education system is cracking. University presidents have said as much and they have really been hiding the damage so as not to cause alarm bells when attracting international students. Cuts to our student services (such as counselling) have kept coming.

The €36.5 million allotted to higher education and further education in the budget is not going to be nearly enough. Student numbers keep increasing, and campuses are becoming squeezed.

The ideological loan

The Cassells report on higher education funding outlines several options. One is publicly funded education, which has been dismissed by many (without paying it enough attention, I believe). The second is a guarantee of more state funding with the proviso that students continue to pay the €3,000 student contribution. The third option – an income-contingent loan that increases student fees to €4,000 or €5,000 a year – has been given wide attention.

It’s worth noting that such systems are failing in the UK: universities are already demanding, four years in, that the fees paid by students increase and £40 (€45) out of every £100 will not be paid back, they estimate.

We don’t need to look at the US too closely to see that student loans are a disaster there.

The Australian model of loans is definitely the best to emulate, but even there student supports and grants have fallen since they were introduced, and Australia continues to write off debt from their loan system.

Cost of living

The cost of living in Dublin is estimated to be €10,000 a year. People are already struggling – and a solution is to increase their fees, apparently. Loans are just an ideological solution, a determination that students should have to pay to be educated. That position isn’t one a country that prizes its educated workforce should take. We need to support our students, not throw them into debt.

I’ve met with several politicians, many of whom allude to the fact that it would be a “brave government” that decides a long-term funding model for higher education. I suppose this means that funding will be applied like a plaster for the next couple of years just to keep our universities going.

We need to be brave. I represent many brave students. They are many: the student parents who go back to education to make a better future for their children, the students who scrape together money for a meagre meal and the students who suffer from mental-health issues without sufficient support.

And we need to be brave now.

Your move, Minister.

Kieran McNulty is president of TCD students union