THE Minister for Education may have taken the spotlight temporarily off the issue of college grants by abolishing fees, but there is still a lot of discontent and confusion and much more will have to be done before the issue is sorted out.
For a start there are still three separate forms of grant in operation - despite the fact that all three are identical. A Higher Education Grant (HEG) is awarded through a county council or corporation and applies to virtually all recognised colleges; ESF grants are operated through local Vocational Education Committees (VECs) and apply to students on ESF funded courses, mainly in RTCs and the DIT; then there are the very inappropriately named VEC scholarships which are the same as HEGs, but are awarded through VECs and apply to nonESF funded courses in RTCs and the DIT.
The problem for students is that they never know which to apply for and which centre to apply to. In practice it is not as complex as it seems - but the students do not know this in advance. In fact you put in one application, either to the local VEC or council and once you have accepted a college place, you must then inform this authority. It will then either finally process your grant or pass it on to the other body if necessary.
But why continue with three separate grants when the procedures, means test levels and amounts payable are identical under all three? Why have people tied up in both VEC offices and county councils poring over the same applications?
Two years ago a committee of inquiry recommended that the systems be merged. Indeed the Minister announced at the time that she was going to do this and the method in operation at the moment was only supposed to be an interim step along this route. So, why has nothing happened?
Indeed, I seem to recollect that the Minister, full of enthusiasm for grant reform, told us that students would soon no longer have to apply separately for a grant at all they could simply include it on their CAO form. Whatever happened to that idea?
. QUALIFYING FOR GRANTS
THE abolition of fees has actually meant that fewer people are eligible for grants than in the past - ironically. The reason is that, when fees existed, sizeable numbers of students who did not qualify for a maintenance grant still qualified for a fees grant - or even half fees. The abolition of fees has removed this segment of students from grant eligibility; they are not losing any money, it is just that as there are no fees, they no longer qualify for a fees grant.
But it does show how some people have missed out in all of this. These are families with income of £18,000 to £22,000, who before the abolition of fees got a fees grant, but now get no assistance at all. In all equity they should have been brought into the maintenance grant category - at least for a half grant - then they would have got some benefit from the free fees bonanza: but as it stands they have got nothing.
The big losers are this group which has been effectively disenfranchised from the grants system but also those dependent on maintenance grants whose grants have gone up by only a tiny amount; the maximum grant for maintaining a student away from home for eight months is £1,600 and if the family income is more than £17,460, you only get a half grant of £800. Living at home, the amounts are £637 and £319 respectively.
Even more surprising is that the means test threshold for qualifying for both the away from home and at home grants is the same. Surety in equity there should be a somewhat higher threshold to qualify for a grant when a student has to move away from home?
This is becoming crucial now that we have got to a stage where there are vacant places in colleges such as Sligo and Letterkenny RTCs which would involve travelling away from home for most students. Time after time, on the Points Race phone in we have had people who wanted to go to one of those colleges but could just not get the finances together.
What is even more alarming is that there appears to be quite a number of people in Dublin who would like to send their children to RTCs down the country but who have worked out that, with tax relief now available on fees to private colleges, it is actually cheaper to send their child to a fee paying college in Dublin than a free RTC.
There is no doubt, it seems to us, that the tax free status of the private colleges in Dublin (introduced this year) is sucking students away from RTC courses outside Dublin - and maybe even universities.
There will be an artificial boost for the colleges next year with the increase in Leaving Cert numbers, but pretty quickly the numbers will start falling irrevocably - and that is when many of the provincial RTCs will really feel the pinch.
Whenever this column mentions that country cousins always seem to manage the funds to send their kids away to college, we get irate letters from Dubliners who say they have no prejudice against going down the country, it is just that they cannot afford it - everyone down the country gets a grant, is their view; which is, of course, not true.
I think the reality is that country families have known all along that their offspring would have to go away to college, so they have planned accordingly for years. It usually only hits a Dublin family at the last moment and they are totally unprepared.
. ABOLITION OF FEES
NONE of this takes away from the fact that large numbers of people to whom we talk are making enormous sacrifices to send their kids to college - and fees abolition certainly has helped many of them.
It also appears possible that it may have made the UK option slightly less attractive to students. Up to now if you lived in a provincial town and had to leave home to go to college in any case, Liverpool or Glasgow with no fees could work out cheaper than UCD or Trinity with fees. Now that differential is gone. Though, of course, for those dependent on a grant, the extension of Irish maintenance grants to students studying in the UK has made it more accessible for the less well off.
But abolishing fees has thrown up the most unusual little things. Take scholarships, for example; many of the scholarships around involved the paying of a student's fees. We have heard from students who have had scholarships discontinued because fees were abolished - in other cases the amount of the scholarship has been reduced.
Can't they just pay them the equivalent of the fees in money? If you qualify for a scholarship, you qualify for it, fees or no fees; there is no reason why a student should not be entitled to the money to fund her maintenance costs, surely?
We have also heard that some college administrations are very niggling indeed about who qualifies for free fees. The student has to have been an Irish resident for at least the past three years with family residing and earning its living here.
We have to spoken to one student who has been sanctioned for a maintenance grant by her county council, so bona fide is her situation, but the university is still refusing to sanction her for free fees; the fact that her father is not Irish appears to be clouding the issue.
. ROUND TWO
TODAY is the last date for receipt of Round Two acceptances; they must be with the CAO in Galway by 5.15 p.m. Go to the bank, pay £5, get the offer stamped and post the acceptance part to the CAO; get the post office to stamp a certificate of posting if you are worried.
. RECHECKS
RECHECK results will be issued on September 27th. The number of requests for rechecks was up this year to about 10,000. Last year, from roughly 9,000 about 650 got upgraded (excluding the 350 affected by the art exam debacle).
Normally, one would not expect more than about 600-700 subject upgradings - that is out of a total of nearly 500,000 exam subjects sat. Most upgradings are in English. Schools will be notified and the upgradings will be sent to the CAO immediately where the student's points will be adjusted accordingly.
Any student who becomes entitled to a place will be offered it - in the unlikely event of it being totally impossible to do so, the place will be held in the following year.
This column would advise any student awaiting a recheck to go ahead seriously with the acceptance and planning for your existing college place; the odds in favour of an upgrading are very low.