Sir, – Circumstances allowed me to achieve a lifelong ambition in 2008 and I embarked on a six- year part-time BA Art Design Degree in Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. (“Off the wall: art students protest over increased fees”, Home News, March 30th.) Fees then charged were in the region of €750. Now, due to the discovery of “an anomaly” in the way our fees were calculated historically by Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, it now proposes to increase our fees to €1,605 for next year.
Reaction from the participants indicates that up to 90 per cent will be unable to continue to complete the course despite having paid fees for each of the years completed to date.
So students who have met all the academic and studio requirements and have progressed to years three, four, or five now find that they are unable to achieve a degree due to their inability to raise the finance to continue. It seems outrageous that GMIT can accept fees from students for years and then force them from a degree course in their final years. Its justification for this is the discovery of an “historical anomaly” in the way fees were calculated.
If such an anomaly exists it should not now be used to penalise students in this draconian fashion and the decision must be revisited. Unlike full-time students, the 200 students on the BA in art and design) part-time programme in Galway and Castlebar are not entitled to avail of the “free fees” scheme. Therefore, if GMIT implements the proposed new fee structure, we will be paying considerably more for our degree than most full-time students, even though we impact far less on the college in terms of tuition time and facilities used.
Also, as part-time students are not entitled to apply for financial aid under the student grant scheme, which is available to full-time students on lower incomes. All 200 BA in art and design part-time students, regardless of their financial circumstances, will have to personally bear the full cost of the 73 per cent increase proposed for this coming academic year, or abandon the degree. So much for all the Government’s talk of adult education, up-skilling and lifelong learning. Is this the way we are to be treated by the third-level institutions offering lip service and “historical accounting anomalies”. – Yours, etc,