My apologies Ferdinand, but when you say that universities must be consulted before a final plan is put in place, it is not completely clear that you mean that universities must be consulted before choosing a final plan. It could be interpreted by a reader, as I did, as meaning that the final plan is chosen by the Minister, in isolation from any expert opinion, and then the task of the universities becomes handling the “detail work” needed to implement that decision. My belief is that such a role is not one the universities should accept; if in fact that is also your belief, then I retract my statement.

Mark, thank you for your interesting post. I fully appreciate the sacrifices made in your family, and in many others, in order to be able to secure a good education. And whatever we do, we need to ensure that people can get such an education in future without having to contemplate excessive hardship and extraordinary sacrifice.

However, at the same time that your sister was able to enter university with the support of ‘free fees’, many others from wealthy backgrounds were able to do the same, and money that should have been invested in higher education went into someone else’s private luxuries. Like you, some argue that the answer to this is higher taxation, particularly for the better off. That’s an outcome we are heading for anyway, but the problem is that almost no government is ever willing to prioritise higher education (and no government of any particular combination has been good at this) – the money is spent on other areas that are thought to be more urgent or more important. Higher education relying solely on the exchequer is asset-stripped and made to run on minimal, inadequate resources, whatever the level of taxation.

However, we do know that a university degree dramatically improves the career and income prospects of a graduate, so that a framework that provides for a contribution from graduates at a point when their salary suggests they can afford it is not unreasonable, particularly when this is accompanied by an appropriate grants system for the less well off.

In response:

The lesson I learnt from my experiences, however, was not that free fees meant that the children of the Smurfit and Haughey families benefited from the exchequer funding, it was that the degree of financial hardship attending college imposes on those at the bottom of the financial ladder is so monumental that it is a highly effective deterrent. Removing it eased a burden on families across the state.

As to the families of the rich enjoying the savings from free fees, to be honest, that was more a story for a slow news day in a bad tabloid newspaper, not a concern for those drafting policy. If those drafting policy were truly concerned about the wealthy gaining services funded from the exchequer like that, they would be far more concerned at the high level of tax evasion amongst that subset of society.

And we already have a framework which provides for a contribution from graduates at a point where their salary suggests they can afford it. It’s called income tax.

Arguing that no Government will ever prioritise funding for education is not acceptable from the universities. No Government will ever prioritise any funding for any project that does not secure their seats in Government, that’s so much a given in Irish political life that it’s a truism. Universities, however, have a moral duty to take the opposing side in the adversarial system that the allocation of State funding has become. They must be unreasonable in the face of demands such as these, they owe that duty to their students in the short term and their own survival in the long term. Such an adversarial system is ridiculously inefficient and unjust when it comes to distributing State funds, but it’s the one that’s there at the moment; and given the degree of immaturity in Irish politics, I doubt it will be changing in nature anytime soon. So if that is the nature of the system, the universities must work to that system, and not to a more rational one which is not in force.

When a recent letter arrived at the various colleges from the HEA advising them to freeze recruitment or lose all funding, the immediate response was to call the solicitor and start talking about legal challanges, calling the papers and beginning a PR campaign against it. That is the kind of action that the universities should be engaging in against the proposed loss of free fees and for the proper funding of the programme. It does involve acrimony and conflict with the Department, and that is to be regretted, but the simple fact is that the universities owe a moral duty of care to their students; and none to the Department, which has created this problem by demonstrating time and again that it feels it has no duty of care to the universities.