Time to get over the Free Fees debate.
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Originally posted last week but got somewhat lost in the swathe of Snip posts. Bumped back to top in hope more debate will ensue. – Mark
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For years now the main debate about education policy in Ireland is about the re-introduction of university fees. Never mind the overcrowding of class rooms or the provision of special needs education the third level fees debate remains king. I guess it is because it is an easy issue to understand the arguments are easy to make. It splits across a nice ideological divide allowing old digs. Statistics are easy to find and quote. Thus making the whole debate farmore sexy. But in the end of the day it is probably the most trivial part of our education policy.
The argument in favour of returning basically is. “The person receiving the education has gained monetarily from the education therefore they should pay”. Now the exact same argument can be made in relation to primary or secondary education. Early school levers earn far less than those that have completed education. So why are the same arguments not made for the abolition of free secondary education?
One argument is that by law you have to attend education until the age of 16. Thus you can’t force someone to do something then charge them for doing it. But after the age of 16, secondary school is still free. Why? When the argument that the person material gains from the free education is the exact same as with third level? The basic reason is that society while only forcing people to stay in education until the age of 16 thinks that for a person to function in society the leaving cert is a basic level of educational achievement. That without it people cannot fully be a part of society can not function etc. Now while that is debatable, many of our parents have no education beyond the inter-cert and function grand in society. Yet times have changed and there is not much use for a junior cert in modern Ireland. So we deem that the society is better off as a whole by having the vast majority of people educated to a leaving Cert level.
So then the question is. Is the leaving cert now no longer considered the minimum level of educational attainment deemed to be beneficial to society. This is not just a question of economics, or whether a high tech workforce produces greater GDP growth rates but whether or not social harmony and the general engendering of an intellectually climate (not the bullshit drinking expresso discussing Nietzsche intellectualism but more the critical thinking aspects) supposedly developed in Universities is of benefit? Indeed whether any of these are developed in university is of course debabtable but it is a debate we need to have. We need to look beyond the individualism of “The person receiving the education has gained monetarily from the education therefore they should pay” and see does the society get a pay back from making the transition from Leaving Cert to University seem a natural progression.
The basic principle and argument against free fees is the levels of people from disadvantaged background. The argument being finances create a barrier to entry, and the argument against being that there has been little increase in the numbers going to university from disadvantaged areas. The problem with all this is that we are using university entry as the bench mark for the measurement of disadvantaged education. We look and see that few from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to university and see it is an issue with the universities. The extent that this permeates the debate about education in Ireland is astounding. But we are not alone in the world in this, most countries try to alter university policy to engineer social. Seriously people it is pure madness.
The reasons that few people from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t go to university is not all about the money. While university is not cheap even with free fees take Limerick, commuting from Moyross to UL is not overly expensive. While a child from Moyross might struggle to find the money to go to Trinity, sending them to UL where they will get a grant is probably not much different than sending them to secondary school with no grant. The main reason that we have lower participation of disadvantaged students is because they are disadvantaged.
The primary schools and secondary schools that they attend are below par. They have many unruly students who are not checked and thus the bright kids in the schools are dragged down with them. It is certainly not a lack of intelligence, do we seriously think that the leaders of the gangs in Limerick are not highly intelligent? So why are in gangs and not in University? Do they think at the age of 17. “Emm well I have enough points for Computer systems but I can make more money selling crack”? No by the age of 17 they are all ready lost to the system. This is not just for the members of gangs but for so many who don’t have the opportunity of third level education. They have been failed miserably by the education system and in many cases as well as by their parents. And this is the issue so few people want to talk about in the open. The issue that no politician will mention so people are just bad parents. Many parents do not instil their kids with a respect and a desire for education. They don’t force them to do their homework and thus are we really surprised that they don’t end up in university?
At the beginning of the post I said that the debate about university fees is trivial and it is. The main reason for the introduction of free fees was to increase participation of under privileged this has not worked. But it was never going to work. Because the issue that it tackled was not an issue. It never had a chance to be an issue. The issue it tackled was an impediment at the age of 17 but the people it targeted never got near that impediment. They were hit by an impediment at the age of 4 when they enrolled in school. An impediment that is rarely debated and even rarely offered solutions and until we debate it and actually solve it, can we then discuss whether free fees achieve what they are meant to.
ah yes i knew when you posted this you wanted to shout im right and everyone else is wrong. bumping proves this
eta: your saying the debate is over why do you keep resurrectng it
Hold on there Steve, I bumped this, as it says in the first line of the post, not Simon.
The post is Simon’s reply to my early pro-payments article which can be seen here, as I said in the first line, it got lost in Snip and hence deserved a bump.
So Steve what is your view? Thanks Mark for bumping it up. What is your view do you think to much focus is put on third level or do you think third level is the key to the holy grail of social mobility.
neither, i already gave part of my views.
“the minimum level of educational attainment deemed to be beneficial to society” is very dangerous term and could be twisted far beyond what I believe you intended to suggest that those without or able to make it through 3rd level are not beneficial to society. I don’t believe that is what you meant but that is the direction those words lead in. Fact is that we have too many people attending 3rd level for the simply sake of it because we have valued those with more practical hands on skills less and those who don’t get their hands dirty more. And that is a mistake. I say that as someone coming from what the categorisation people would term “an unskilled manual labour background” and I’ve literally worked cleaning shit from walls. We have lost the notion of valuing hard work and pride in a job well done and exchanged it for how cool is your job title. We had carpenters and plumbers making a packet for the last 10 years but we were endorsing the college is best for all message across the board.
Also, I would question if there are many parents out there who would support the notion that primary and secondary education are currently ‘free’. The state makes a subvention per pupil to the schools and pays the salaries of the teachers after that it is fund-raising for this and lots of paying for that. And not secondary education experiences are the same either. I would say our debate needs as you indicate to be more that about fees. It should be what is education really for, does it need to be fulltime for as long as it is, if we have scarce resources where is the best place to direct it (I would favour universal pre-school support long before I’d be support universal free 3rd level), and if we are true to the idea of life-long education than it needs to about more that classrooms and schools. We should make accessible, publicly funded and well maintained libraries the very lifeblood of education.
If we had all the money in the world, I would still favour the person attending 3rd level making some direct contribution themselves. That’s just the way I look at the world. And the best way of doing that is related to their income post graduation. I also favour society making a contribution to the cost of this education in all but the most financially well set of people.
Simon,
This is a very thought provoking article and it was indeed a pity it got swamped by Snip. You’re right to point out that the debate on free third level fees is a bit of a distraction, at least in the way it is conducted. We might be better off posing the question in terms of : what do free fees do for us?
The political reason given for making third level education a fee-free zone was that (a) it would increase access for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to third level, especially those from semi-skilled backgrounds whose family income fell short of qualification for grant-aid; (b) an ideological premise that, like education at primary and secondary levels, universality of access should apply and not be constrained by ability to pay and free fees for everyone was the best way to give effect to that principle (c) something needed to be done to wipe out the taxation benefit to the better off that they achieved through various loopholes for setting aside endowments for their children’s future education. The argument made was that the benefit in tax receipts from eliminating these loopholes would ultimately outweigh the actual cost to the State of introducing free third level education.
The unstated political reason was that the announcement of free fees would keep the Labour Party’s middle class voters on board in the next election in 1997. In the event, it didn’t – the ungrateful beasts said ‘thanks very much’, pocketed the dosh, and went back to voting for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail and the PDs.
The increase in the number of disadvantaged students attending third level didn’t really work out, though defenders of free fees would argue that it takes time, maybe even a generation or two, before effectiveness on this score can be properly judged.
As for (b), the principle of universality in entitlements is not a very good one and fosters inequalities in society rather than narrowing them (e.g. the impact on primary care services in disadvantaged areas of universal ‘free medical cards’ for the over 70s illustrates the point, as does the immediate shift by the middleclasses toward fee-paying secondary schools for their offspring following the introduction of free fees and the impact of this on pupil mix and pupil numbers in schools in poorer communities.)
On (c),well, it’s generally acknowleged there have to be better ways of snuffing out fleas than taking a sledgehammer to them.
One of the other main consequences of the introduction of free fees was to increase centralised state control over third level institutions, which is perhaps the reason why the Department of Education was so happy to go along with the political proposal in the first place. I don’t know anyone in the sector who would argue that this is a ‘good thing’ and the widespread dismay caused by the latest directive on staff embargoes from the Department of Education would tend to bear this out.
I think the first mistake was to approach this issue along class lines. Generally speaking, the better educated the population, the wealthier the society. For a peripheral country with few natural wealth resources, the creation of intellectual capital is essential. The real question then, is how do you achieve this for the maximum number of the population?
Instead of tinkering around the edges with policies like free fees, that were primarily populist and not thought through, we might have been better off completely reviewing our education system from rump to stump and then putting the money in where it was likely to have most effect – arguably at pre-school and primary levels. We’ve missed the boat on that opportunity and the unhappy truth is that we can no longer afford the free fees fantasy either.
Simon,
Sorry I haven’t got around to replying directly, I’ve been very busy – as you can tell from the bump I gave it, I think it’s a worthwhile article and adds to the debate. Veronica has given my view on it for the most part, especially in her final paragraph – I’ll add one thing…
You say…”The argument in favour of returning basically is. ‘The person receiving the education has gained monetarily from the education therefore they should pay’”
I’d contend that – I argued that, while the above is an element, in the long term a poor quality third-level system is a waste of time even if we do have a large number of people passing through. “No point in a load of people who went to college without paying having a bit of paper with ‘BA’ written on it if the eduaction behind the paper is of a shite quality”, may be a more concise and brutal summary of my arguement…