Media coverage of the Higher Education Authority's most recent report, Who Went to College in 2004, has rightly emphasised the progress that has been made in extending to a wider social sphere the benefits offered by higher education.
In the short space of the six years between 1998 and 2004 the rate of entry to higher education by the children of manual workers, (which back in 1980 had been as low as 7.5 per cent), rose from 28 per cent to 43 per cent.
By contrast, the proportion of children of non-manual workers such as clerks and salespersons entering higher education has remained stuck throughout the last two decades below 30 per cent - a puzzling phenomenon that I believe requires further research.
The detailed analysis of many aspects of higher education entry in this new report is very welcome.
The Higher Education Authority has been understandably preoccupied with securing percentage data that would as far as possible be comparable with those from earlier surveys of higher education entry carried out by Pat Clancy in UCD. But this may have contributed to the exclusion from the report of information on changes in the actual numbers of students from different social backgrounds entering different streams of higher education. And the absence of such numerical data from the report has had the effect of obscuring the significance of some very important recent changes in the structure of higher education.
It was already known that during this most recent six-year period the increase in the number of higher education places reflected an expansion of about one-sixth in the university sector and an even greater expansion of the smaller colleges of education sector, as well as of other colleges such as the private Dublin Business School and Griffith. By contrast, the number of students in institutes of technology actually fell slightly.
From this new report it is possible to relate this shift in the balance of the third-level sector to rapid changes that have been taking place in the structure of our society, which, like most others, has recently been experiencing a marked upward shift in its social mix.
A precise measurement of this shift in the most recent inter-census period has been made more difficult by a large increase between the 1996 and 2002 population censuses in the number of people identified by the CSO as belonging to a residual "Other" group, at the expense of the identified socio-economic groups.
The authors of this study have concluded, reasonably enough I think, that some half of that inter-censual increase in the numbers of teenagers in this "Other" category probably consisted of manual workers - and they have based their analyses on this assumption.
But even when allowance is thus made for such an understatement of the numbers in this socio-economic group, it still emerges that the proportion of the higher education entry cohort who were children of manual workers and farmers seems to have fallen from 41 per cent in 1996 to 33 per cent between 1996 and 2002.
In this same period the proportion of our working population employed in management and in the professions rose correspondingly, from 26 per cent to 34 per cent.
Now, the institutes of technology have always drawn heavily on the manual worker and farmer socio-economic groups for their students. Indeed as late as 1996 just half of their students came from these backgrounds, and less than one-third were children of executives, managers, or people in the professions.
For these colleges, the rapid erosion of their main student base during this period more than offset the positive effects of the parallel general growth in the demand for higher education.
For, although amongst the upper socio-economic groups the ITs have held their ground, with an increase in the number of their students from such backgrounds that has been pro-rata with the expansion in the size of these groups, it will be seen from the accompanying table, which is based on the data in this report, that this success has been strikingly offset by the impact upon the ITs of the continuing drop in the size of the manual worker and farmer groups.
Moreover, the effect of this factor has been intensified by the emergence of a new phenomenon: a perceptible shift from ITs to universities on the part of the newer cohorts of children of manual workers. Between 1998 and 2004 the proportion of such students choosing an IT fell by one-eighth, most of this shift favouring the university sector.
The children of manual workers and farmers have thus been seeking to join in the general up-scaling of skills that has been helping our society to move ahead of some of its neighbours.
Note: The figures for higher education entry in the attached table include students whose permanent residence was outside the State. In 2004 there were 2,004 such students. However in the same year over 3,000 students resident here entered higher education institutions elsewhere, so the overall Irish entry rate to higher education in 2004 was about one-and-a-half percentage points higher than the figure of 58 per cent shown in this table - viz., about 60 per cent.