The rich, not the poor, benefited most from this scheme in terms of resource distribution, writes FERDINAND von PRONDZYNSKI
MINISTER FOR EDUCATION Batt O'Keeffe has put third level fees back on the agenda. Earlier this month we had been told that funding for third level would be reduced over the coming year, and that new reporting obligations for particular types of expenditure would be introduced.
In fact, to put all this in context a little further, while Government expenditure on third level teaching and research has increased dramatically over the past 10 years or so, this has been accompanied by an even greater increase in student numbers and research activities.
As a result, almost everything that universities do right now in their core mission is being funded below cost. The amount of money that universities receive per student has, in real terms, decreased year-on-year for some time. Most Irish universities are now in debt, and in the face of further funding cuts are facing the need to take steps that will directly affect the quality of the education that they can provide.
Even when funding was, relatively speaking, much better in the early years of this decade, a review of higher education commissioned by the Government and conducted by the OECD concluded that a "quantum leap" in funding was required if Irish universities were to stand any chance of competing internationally. But in fact nothing much happened, and so by March of this year two of the university heads, UCD's president Hugh Brady and TCD's provost John Hegarty, writing in The Irish Times, warned that as a country we were gambling with our future.
It may be necessary to remind ourselves that while the Celtic Tiger was made possible by various policies and Government decisions, it was sustainable only because the universities and other third level institutions were able to expand dramatically, providing the skilled labour that was needed by companies investing in Ireland.
Right now, the needs of potential investors are more ambitious, and are linked even more to what universities can provide. To put this bluntly, if we want to avoid a lengthy recession and if we want to return quickly to significant and sustainable economic growth, this country needs an extremely well resourced higher education system. Moreover, the funds available to the sector need to deliver higher quality, and not just increasing quantity.
In many ways there is a good story to tell here. For the past few years it has been evident that senior members of the Government, including the Taoiseach, have recognised the importance of the university sector. For example, the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation has set the right targets and is appropriately ambitious for Ireland. But what may not yet have been properly appreciated is that these targets and ambitions cost much more than the taxpayer appears to be able to pay.
We cannot easily persuade anyone overseas that we are creating a knowledge society when the key institutions that must deliver on this goal are proportionately getting less than half the funding of their competitors in countries such as the US and the UK.
It is in the context of these problems that some of us have been arguing for a while that we need to look again at the appropriateness of the "free fees" system. When fees were abolished in the 1990s, this was done for highly honourable motives. It was felt that a higher education sector free at the point of use would encourage greater participation and create an environment in which education at all levels was seen as a right and as something to which anyone could and should aspire.
It is true that participation in third level increased in the years since free fees were introduced. However, the increase in participation by those from disadvantaged backgrounds has not been dramatic, and furthermore is probably more related to the access programmes that universities have introduced at their own expense, often supported not by Government money but by philanthropic donations.
In addition, free fees had a number of undesirable effects. First, perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of free fees at third level were private secondary schools. Parents who had anticipated having to fund their children's higher education redirected the money to private secondary education. The main losers of this were State-funded secondary schools.
Secondly, because a significant majority of third level students are still from a middle class background, most of the State resources paying for free fees were actually funding the well off, while the disadvantaged were neglected - as is visible, for example, in the modest support for access students and in the failure to extend free fees to part-time programmes, which would disproportionately be taken by poorer students. It can therefore be argued that free fees were in fact a redistribution of resources from the poor to the rich.
Thirdly, as was predicted when free fees were introduced, it quickly became evident that the taxpayer could not afford the programme. In the period since the introduction of free fees, the aggregate funding of universities (consisting both of recurrent grants and the grant by which the Government pays the fees) has declined significantly when compared with the income from the recurrent grants and from fees paid by students up to the mid-1990s. In essence, rather than having the taxpayer pick up the bill for free fees, the universities themselves have more or less had to absorb the cost over a period of time.
None of this is sustainable now. We cannot expand third level participation, or create world class research teams, on the back of such a resourcing model. And while the problems we face this year due to planned cuts are dramatic, the solution for the longer term is not to return us to where, in real terms, we might have been in 2002. We need to go far beyond that to the quantum leap that was independently identified as necessary.
We need to redirect more resources to where they are really needed most urgently, funding those from disadvantaged backgrounds. And we need to accept that we simply cannot achieve all this without tuition fees that are paid by those who can afford them, and paid for those who cannot. It is worth noting that no universities at or near the top of international league tables have achieved that status while being funded solely by the taxpayer, without tuition fees.
I accept that a return to tuition fees is not an altogether easy decision to take, and I know it requires courage and vision on the part of politicians. I believe that Ireland's politicians do have these attributes, and that it will be possible to put in place a new framework that is both adequate in terms of resourcing and fair in terms of its effect. But while we discuss this, we cannot afford to suffer the kind of cuts that have been signalled, nor indeed can we easily accommodate the increasingly bureaucratic controls that are to accompany them.
Therefore, I strongly applaud the step signalled by the Minister this week, and I know that the universities will work closely with him to develop this debate. But I would also urge him to look again at the public funding for third level in the interim.
Investment in higher education is not about satisfying the ambitions of universities as institutions, or their presidents. It is about meeting the ambitions of Ireland as a country, and our ability to create a successful, prosperous and equitable future for the next generations. We cannot afford to decline to undertake this investment, or even to delay it.
• Ferdinand von Prondzynski is president of Dublin City University