Madam, - Brenda Doyle (November 4th) believes students who attend fee-paying secondary schools should continue to pay for education at third level, while those who attend non-fee-paying schools should not.
There are a number of gaping holes in this simplistic argument.
Firstly, it should be pointed out that if a student comes from a wealthy background, it is likely that his or her parents already pay a substantially higher rate of income tax, on a larger sum, than the parents of students from a less wealthy household. The wealthier parents are therefore already subsidising third-level education to a greater degree.
Secondly, simply because students attend a fee-paying secondary school does not mean that they are rich, and can therefore afford to shell out what can sometimes amount to much larger sums each year for third-level education. Perhaps they come from families that prize education and have made sacrifices to give them the best possible chance in life?
On that note, I would like to highlight the FF-PD government's dismal record on education spending, which dropped by 0.6 per cent of GDP between 1995 and 2005, leaving Ireland ranked 27th out of 29 OECD countries in terms of the proportion of GDP per capita spent on second-level students.
Yet Brenda Doyle believes people should be punished for spending their own hard-earned cash on their child's education in an attempt to redress the balance. The Government is fond of talking up our "knowledge economy". It is high time it realised that an economy based on knowledge can only be sustained by encouraging, and not discouraging, participation in third- and even fourth-level education. - Yours, etc,