Sir, – I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry when reading Seán Flynn’s report (Front page, May 24th) on the latest HEA position on higher education funding.
The abolition of higher education tuition fees in the late 1990s must be seen as one of the most catastrophic education policy decisions ever made. It was almost certainly regressive and was pro-cyclical – it boosted middle-class disposable incomes when they were rising anyhow.
The reversal of this policy is, however, not an easy matter: it will (once again pro-cyclically) reduce household incomes which are already taking a hammering. In that context, the HEA concern about the ability of the Exchequer to afford a 30 per cent increase in enrolments should be replaced by a concern as to whether students and their families will be willing to pay for such a large quantity of higher education at much higher prices. The idea that demand is a negative function of price is one that seems to get habitually overlooked by policymakers.
Never mind, the HEA apparently intends to get three new reviews of higher education policy including one by international experts on the structure of Irish higher education.
What on earth has happened to several excellent OECD reports and to the Hunt report? What about the plethora of policy advice given by Irish economists on higher education structures and finance? The answer is nothing, so here we go again, looking for more expensive consultancy advice which will no doubt be ignored.
The student registration fee (now €2,250, and soon to be €3,000) is surely in excess of registration costs. It is probably enough to finance a significant proportion of tuition costs in many subjects in arts, humanities, business and law, which means that Exchequer finance is effectively concentrated on science, engineering and medicine.
This “registration” fee is really a tuition fee by another name, and refusing to recognise this is an example of how (alongside incompetence) political cowardice dominates educational policy-making. – Yours, etc,