Madam, - Your newspaper has been a consistent booster of the OECD report for reform of tertiary education including the key recommendation that the cost of implementing its major reforms should be covered by what is being glibly referred to as "the restoration of fees". In the interest of the truth it must be clarified that university fees were never abolished: the change effected by Minister Niamh Bhreatnach, and that Minister Noel Dempsey sought, without avail, to reverse, was that, regardless of family income, the undergraduate fees of all full-time day students should be paid directly to universities by the Exchequer rather than, as previously, by the students, or their parents.
Therefore, each university continued to enjoy a fee income paid on behalf of every full-time student registered with it who remained in good standing - fees that have been increasing steadily well ahead of the rate of inflation. Over and above this fee, universities have been permitted by the government to levy from every student, or their parents, an additional registration fee, which for the academic year 2005-6 will come close to €1,000.
What the OECD report recommends is that yet another university fee be imposed - this fee to be paid by students or their parents with no diminution in the "fee" that is currently being paid on their part by the taxpayer. The result for universities would be at least a doubling of the fee income that they currently enjoy, one half to be paid by the Exchequer and the other half by parents or students. I use the phrase, "at least" because the business-speak of the report suggests that each university should be at liberty to charge what the market would bear without government oversight. One can envisage a minimum fee of €10,000 for each year of undergraduate study for professional courses leading to high paying careers.
Such a multiplication in undergraduate fee income would indeed effect a dramatic improvement in the capacity of universities to conduct expensive scientific research. I, as the director of a research centre dedicated to the humanities and social sciences, would obviously welcome such extra funding even if we could expect but crumbs from the science-rich table. But are students, potential students, their parents and the humble taxpayer willing to pay this price to enable our universities to seek entry to the premier league of "research universities" or to poach some of their players? And if not this, will taxpayers be willing to countenance the alternative concept of a competitive €30,000,000 "reform fund" that your newspaper suggests is winning favour with Minister Hanafin?
And will these reforms proceed beyond the mere merging of departments, which will provoke more clamour than savings, to an inter-institutional sharing of research space and resources, especially among the plethora of tertiary institutions in the Dublin area?
Such issues, I believe, must be put to all stakeholders before the debate on OECD report proceeds further. - Yours, etc.,
Prof NICHOLAS CANNY,
Director, Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change,
NUI, Galway.