Having been to the fore in realising the value of higher education for development, it would be ironic if the State should now start treating it as an optional item whose cost should be borne by students and parents, argues Tony White
The long-term financing of higher education is looming up as one of the most contentious issues facing the Government. The Minister for Education and Science, Mr Dempsey, appears to be contemplating reintroducing fees or finding other ways of having a greater proportion of the cost of higher education borne by students or their parents.
He has strong encouragement from many sources to go in that direction and there are also significant international trends supporting him.
Apart from the political difficulties which reintroducing fees may bring, there is one argument which the Minister should use to persuade his Cabinet colleagues that higher education deserves special treatment in Government funding. Otherwise Irish education policy may be about to take the important step of coming to regard higher education primarily as a form of consumption rather than investment.
Internationally, two main arguments have emerged as to why a greater proportion of the cost of third-level education should be borne by students or their parents. Both are now surfacing in Ireland.
The first relates to equity, which Mr Dempsey seems intent on making the main focus of his term of office. The equity case for reintroducing third-level fees argues that those who are already better off receive a large public subsidy to send their children to higher education, where those children receive an education which enables them to earn substantially more than non-graduates. Those who benefit most should therefore at least share the cost and not rely almost exclusively on the taxpayer.
The argument is simply stated but not as easily acted upon. It is a political hot potato. Where higher education is free, students and parents, who are also voters, prefer to keep it that way. Reintroducing fees does not present a problem for the wealthy or the upper middle class. It does, however, for the middle and lower income groups, those without capital.
Currently the participation rate in higher education in Ireland stands at 50 per cent of the age cohort. It has continued to increase during the years of free fees. The Minister presumably wants it to keep rising. Reintroducing fees could stall or reverse the process.
The equity argument in any case becomes weaker as the participation rate rises and the proportion of graduates in the population increases. Making the rich pay is fine as a slogan when higher education is an elite activity. It has diminishing validity when half the age cohort is in higher education. Not all have wealthy parents nor will they all become wealthy themselves.
The second argument for reintroducing fees suggests that the ability of democratic governments to tax in amounts sufficient to meet the most pressing social needs is increasingly limited.
Only a small number of those needs - such as improved healthcare, primary and secondary education, housing, the environment, a decent safety net for the poor and the elderly - can justify priority.
Higher education, the argument goes, is not in that category. It is more a private than a public good, which can and should be paid for by its beneficiaries.
Even if it were largely regarded as a public good, free tuition can only be maintained in countries with high levels of taxation, such as Scandinavia. The last general election would not suggest that the Irish electorate wishes to go that route.
The trend internationally is to look for higher contributions from parents or students. In the 1990s public universities in the US saw sizeable increases in tuition fees. Holland, Australia and Britain all moved from grants to loans over the 1990s. Austria introduced tuition fees in 2001.
When Niamh Bhreathnach abolished tuition fees in 1995-96 she was bucking the trend. Ireland was joining a slowly contracting European mainstream of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, which traditionally have had free tuition in higher education.
Higher education has been one of the success stories of the Irish State since independence. The seeds for this were largely sown in the 1960s.
Spurred on by OECD-inspired investigations and research, including the monumental Investment in Education report of 1965, education policy-makers began to look on education as an investment in the country's economic future.
The educational planners were ahead of the industrialists in this development. It was only in the 1980s that industrial policy- makers and the IDA embraced the concept of human capital and the potential of educated manpower. The education system became one of the main contributors to the economic boom of the 1990s.
Ireland continued to regard higher education as an investment when other developed countries increasingly treated it as a form of consumption, as primarily a private rather than a public good.
Those formulating industrial policy have now come to see it as a cornerstone of future development, particularly in its contribution to research.
It would be ironic if the Department of Education and Science and its Minister, having pioneered the approach to higher education as investment, were to be to the fore in abandoning it.
• Tony White is the author of Investing in People: Higher Education in Ireland from 1960 to 2000, published by the Institute of Public Administration.