A chara, – The headline on Carl O’Brien’s article on the findings of a socioeconomic analysis by the Higher Education Authority (“Affluent graduates earn more within months of leaving college”, Education, February 16th) should not come as a surprise to anybody.
The businesses that pay the best graduate rates are all very vocal about their diversity programmes.
They may well be diverse in certain visible ways but many strike me as lacking real socioeconomic diversity. A particular type of Dublin accent seems to prevail and more needs to be done to break the “class ceiling”.
The Government’s National Access Plan, aimed at boosting the participation of underrepresented groups in higher education, is part of the solution but our businesses need to do more.
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
If they are serious about diversity, they need to put socioeconomic diversity at the forefront of their graduate recruitment policies. – Yours, etc,
REAMONN O’LUAN,
Churchtown,
Dublin 14.