Should all taxpayers be expected to continue funding the education of the wealthy, asks Brian Mooney
The notion that a factory worker having a few quiet pints in his local pub, while smoking a cigarette, is helping to pay for the university education of a young person, who has just spent six years in a fee-paying school, may seem like a crazy one, but it is the truth.
There is no such thing as free third-level fees. All education costs money, and third-level education costs huge sums of money. What happened in 1995 was that the then minister for education, Niamh Bhreathnach, removed the cost from the individual user and spread it across the entire tax-paying public.
This may have seemed a good idea at the time. It was thought that such a policy would encourage more children from socially deprived backgrounds to enter third-level education. No such change took place. The students who make it to third-level have passed through a series of filter systems, both educational and social, which have effectively excluded a large segment of our young people from educational advancement by their fifteenth birthday. Currently, over 13,000 young people do not even reach Leaving Certificate level.
By funding third-level fees from general taxation, the State is removing that financial burden from the parents of the students who benefit from the system. Is this good policy, when it leads to the underprivileged, who never reach third-level, paying for the wealthy and middle-classes who do? Can we identify what has changed as a result of the policy since it was implemented?
Third-level education has expanded greatly and a growing number of young people enter the system. Unfortunately up to 40 per cent of those entering some Institute of Technology programmes, and over 30 per cent of those entering some degree programmes, do not complete their courses.
This points to a serious deficit in adequate guidance and counselling in our second-level schools. Faced with a choice between a properly funded guidance and counselling system, which ensured that each student entered a third-level course appropriate to their interests and aptitudes, or free third-level fees for all, I would fund the guidance and counselling service at second-level.
Apart from the fact that more students are entering third-level, one of the obvious changes has been the growth of fee-paying schools. Since 1995, existing fee-paying schools experienced an explosion in applications and new schools operating as profit-making businesses opened throughout the country. The struggle for places in some of these colleges puts the search for All-Ireland final tickets in the shade. It is not unusual for college secretaries to get calls from parents to enter their child's name on a school's books once a scan has identified the sex of the fetus. What is going on here?
It is simple. Parents perceiving that their children's economic advancement depends on their success in the Leaving Certificate will use resources at their disposal to give them the greatest opportunity to succeed. No parent would do any less.
Relieved of the burden of funding third-level education, parents transferred their spending power to second-level. These schools occupied all the top places in the college entry tables published by The Irish Times.
The fees paid by parents to these schools enables them to provide smaller class sizes, a guidance counsellor for every 200 students, the widest range of subject choice, and one-to-one remedial assistance where required.
The local secondary school is now hit with the double whammy of a demographic drop in the birth rate, and a loss of students, whose parents devote the money previously earmarked for third-level fees to a fee-paying school. In time, this results in a loss of teachers as student numbers drop, resulting in less subject choice, an ageing staff and an undermining of morale.
Is it any surprise that far fewer students from standard secondary schools make it to the sought-after places in colleges? This may not have been what Niamh Bhreathnach set out to achieve, but if she looks around her in her local area of south Dublin, it is the result of her action.
The Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, is right to open a debate on the subject. The public fears that such a debate will result in the return of third-level fees, with the resultant saving being pocketed by a grateful Minister for Finance. Mr Dempsey would pay a heavy political price if this happened.
If, on the other hand, a review resulted in a revised allocation of resources, which gave a real chance for the factory worker's children to enter and survive in third-level, a good day's work would have been done. Nobody wishes to deny anyone places at third-level because of incapacity to pay, but many are currently denied because of inadequate grants.
I would go so far as to say that parents who can afford to fund private fee-paying second-level education for their children, which gives them a considerable advantage, should continue to fund them at third-level. Capacity to pay does not enter the equation, as they are already funding their children's education.
Any savings made in this way should be immediately invested in improved resources at both first and second-level to give children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds a better chance at self-advancement.
Measures should also be introduced to ensure that the fees paid by the wealthy are not removed from the tax pool by measures to facilitate tax avoidance, such as covenanting.
Brian Mooney is president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors