When the last survey of access to higher education was carried out five years ago, almost all children of higher professional workers were entering higher education, notes Garret FitzGerald. For the children of semi-skilled and skilled workers, however, the proportion was 22-23 per cent.
As a result of this class bias, 30 per cent of those of higher education age whose fathers were in the professions, employers or managers or farmers constituted half of all higher education students and two-thirds of all university students.
This imbalance owes a lot to financial factors for, even after the abolition of fees, the miserable level of maintenance grants, especially for less well-off families not lucky enough to live near a higher-level institution, is a serious inhibition.
But an even more fundamental barrier is cultural. The circumstances of life in working-class areas are not favourable to students remaining in education after 16. For children in such areas the blockage comes long before the point of entry. A key factor in this is peer pressure, which for children at all social levels is a hugely powerful influence factor, but which may take quite different forms in different communities.
Even where parental attitudes and school expectations operate to counter peer pressures hostile to educational ambition, these may not always prevail. And where either parental attitudes or school expectations, or both, operate negatively, there is little chance of a child reaching third level; or even, perhaps, completing second level. Indeed, there is reason to believe that for a minority of children the problem starts at an early stage of primary education and is one of poor school attendance.
One of the worst features of our educational system has been the neglect of this problem through the failure to provide an operational school attendance system. The new National Educational Welfare Board has been given barely 40 per cent of the €13 million it needs to tackle this most neglected feature of our educational system.
Further up the school cycle, one-sixth of children still do not attempt the Leaving Certificate examination, and in some disadvantaged areas of cities and towns this proportion can by as high as one-third.
An important element influencing educational progression in Ireland is the urban-rural divide, which is, however, strongly reinforced by a geographical factor; educational ambition being much more marked in the south-west and west than in the east of the country.
The inter-county differences in respect of higher education can only be described as extreme and, in terms of county income levels, almost perverse. Thus Kildare is the third-richest county in Ireland, but has by far the lowest rate of third-level participation in the country: in 2001-2002 the number of Kildare-resident students in higher education represented barely 25 per cent of the numbers who had been aged 13-17 in that county in 1996; whereas the equivalent figure for one of the poorest counties, Leitrim, was twice as high, at 51 per cent.
Longford-Westmeath excepted, throughout more prosperous Leinster this figure averages only 38 per cent. In Munster it is almost 47 per cent. And in Connacht it is almost 55 per cent. (The figures for attendance at higher-level institutions in the State by students from the three Ulster counties, and possibly also Louth, are low, but are, of course, distorted by a flow of students to Northern Ireland).
The low figures for most of Leinster may, in part at least, reflect the fact that this province has a longer history of industrial activity which has traditionally offered employment opportunities to school-leavers without the need for further education. In this respect Leinster has been closer to industrialised parts of Britain than to other parts of our State.
It has been said that the very low higher-education figures for Kildare and also Laois-Offaly (36 per cent) reflect past ready availability of employment in Bord na Móna, which may have led to an undervaluation of higher education.
In Munster and Connacht educational motivation is clearly a most positive factor. Munster has traditionally had a strong educational orientation, and many in the west of Ireland have seen higher education as a means of coping with a lack of employment opportunities within the region, by opening opportunities for employment elsewhere in the island, or abroad.
These factors seem to have been strong enough to outweigh financial constraints, even where these are severe; whether because of low income or because, even where there is a higher income, there are a number of children to be supported through third level.
Within this overall geographical pattern the higher education problem is to a considerable degree a highly localised one, being largely concentrated in working-class areas and particularly in areas of social disadvantage in Dublin and in some other urban areas.
Because of this, and because it is a cultural problem before it ever reaches the stage of becoming a financial one, its resolution will be impossible without targeted action of a kind that both politicians and civil servants, for different reasons, are most unwilling to contemplate and ill equipped to organise.
As I have pointed out before in this column, politicians tend to be jealous of any special treatment being given to areas other than those they individually represent, while civil servants are loath to contemplate any discretionary allocation of public resources, which they fear, not without reason, might be abused by politicians for the benefit of their own constituency, instead of being applied where it is really needed.
To tackle the problem of negative urban working-class attitudes to higher education will require a major intensification of the efforts already being made by many dedicated teachers. The teachers suffer considerable strain in working with children, many of whom see no advantage in remaining at school to 16, never mind remaining to take the Leaving Certificate, which at least one-third of them fail to do. For most of them higher education, and in particular university education, is beyond their range of vision, appearing threatening to them rather than potentially liberating.
Teachers in such areas often get little support from many of the parents of the children they teach, and in a minority of cases find themselves having to offer some of their charges, not just their teaching skills but also emotional support of a kind that they do not get from a minority of dysfunctional parents.
For many of these teachers the strain of their work is intense. They deserve, and need, support of a kind that teachers in other more favoured areas do not require. Additional payments could help to sustain them in that work and might encourage more teachers to take on this kind of task.