The Fees Thing

Hands up who didn’t see this one coming?

For months now, the heads of the universities have seemed a bit too cheerful, and it seems likely this was because someone had a word in their ear.

Somehow, in the last few years, while steadily cutting funding to third level just to see how much longer they could last, the government and the aforemention uni-heads have managed to convince the outside world (or is it just mainstream media?) that bringing back fees is not only the best solution, but a perfectly reasonable one.

And they announce it two days before leaving cert results are published.

One thing I have noticed in the last few days is that on the likes of boards.ie, it’s the Leaving Cert thread on fees that is having the biggest debate. I sat in McDonald’s yesterday listening to two girls who are going into 5th year talking about how they have their college courses picked and planned, but even they are now worried that by the time they get to the CAO form there’ll be a big red mark at the bottom saying “Remember kiddies, arts is €5,000; science is €7,000 and if you want to study medicine just hand over your first born”.

The basis of free fees is a simple one: that education is a right, not a privilege that should be confined to the lucky few who can afford it. Those who argue that free fees are not helping to encourage those from less well-off families to go to college are missing a key point – that the very existence of fees means people who don’t have a spare €20,000 won’t even consider it, let alone apply, let alone get to the stage of finding out if there is a functioning grant system that might take some of the edge of that much debt. If you think telling someone that they won’t be up to their eyeballs in debt until they have their first job, chat to a few people who are just about reaching that level now and see how they’d feel about having that kind of loan to pay off when they’re trying to get their post-college lives together.

On the grant system, it is significant that this has been, and remains, unfair, unequal, and fundamentally flawed. Fees or no fees, the system needs to be changed so that those who need assistance are the ones getting it, and so that that assistance is vaguely in line with the real cost of going to college. Nobody with any knowledge of the current grant system can dispute that neither of those scenarios are currently the case.

The means test for the grant is perhaps the most relevant aspect in relation to the current fees debate – not least because of the abstract comments about ‘better off’ families being the only ones affected. Currently ‘better off’ families are the ones who can’t get the grant. What’s that? Giant loopholes? Wealthy farmers and PAYE workers dancing their way through that loophole? No doubt the DES will mend their ways and suddenly develop a fair system for means testing. I mean, look at the medical card system. That works, right?

Two major arguments are being made in favour of the return of fees.

The first is that colleges are underfunded. This is undeniable. Core funding for third level has been massively cut in the era of the supposedly knowledge-based celtic tiger, but what they’re not telling you is that this isn’t about to change. In fact, if fees were to be re-instated, you can bet your bottom dollar (well, if you haven’t just used it to pay off your gargantuan student loan) that core funding will be cut further. Better still, if the department stunned everyone by ensuring that it really was only the ‘many millionaires of ireland’ that were paying fees? It wouldn’t generate enough cash to properly fund one college, let alone all of them. But these are the minor details that BattMan is leaving out.

The second reason that seems to have been decided upon by the Pro-Fees PR gurus is that the ‘many millionaires’ are spending money on private secondary schools instead of college fees, and that this isn’t fair. Is this some attempt to start leeson-street-wars? Sure, this is going to get the goat of many, particularly those not inclined towards trying to buy points for their offspring. But dealing with what is definitely a major problem in the secondary education system shouldn’t be used as an argument in favour of third level fees. It’s greed, and nothing more, on the part of the DES, and frankly there are much better ways of killing grind culture. Like pointing out the percentage of those who failed maths today and who had been doing grinds for two years.

If the ‘many millionaires’ decide to pay for their child to attend a fee-paying private college, most likely because their child didn’t get the points to get into a free-fees institution, then that’s fine. That is their choice. But it is much, much more important that every child in the state has the option of gaining further education in some form, somewhere, without their financial background impacting on them having that choice.

The biggest issue, as I see it, is that the bar has moved.

Primary education was once seen as the bar – then it was made free to all, because it was ‘required’.

Secondary education then became the bar – and guess what, it was made free to all.

Third level education is now the bar. A degree of some sort is increasingly the measure for employers in terms of hiring a candidate, and in fact increasingly huge numbers are going on to a minimal further year of study beyond that so they can have ‘the edge’.

If you take back the freedom to go on to third level, you exclude a huge proportion of society from the option of reaching that bar. Yay inequality.

I could go on, but I won’t – for now.