The chairman of the Higher Education Authority (HEA), Dr Don Thornhill, has warned against cutting education spending to fund the health budget.
Dr Thornhill said some analysts were already speculating that State expenditure on areas such as education would have to be reduced to fund the health budget. "But there is another and more dynamic way of addressing the challenge," he said. The better educated we were, the less likely we were to use the health services, he added.
Committing resources to education would enable the State to reduce a steep increase in health spending likely over the next decade. He was speaking in Dublin as the HEA published its latest report on college entry trends.
"Not that any of us should oppose health expenditure. But which is ethically more acceptable? Spending on prevention or spending on dealing with the consequences of illness," he asked.
Apart from the link between health and education, Dr Thornhill, said education spending could be justified in other ways. "We also need to look at the economic returns. The ESRI estimate that improving education levels during the 1980s and 1990s accounted for about 20 per cent of the total growth in economic output," he said.
"Knowledge has become the most important factor determining our standard of living - more than land, tools or labour - and is becoming more so."
Dr Thornhill, a former secretary-general of the Department of Education and one of the most influential voices in the Irish education sphere, said Ireland had done well to get its third level participation rates to 50 per cent. Japan is already achieving participation rates at third level of over 60 per cent, he said.