All the issues involved in the different levels of participation in higher education were discussed at a conference organised by the Higher Education Authority last Tuesday and Wednesday.
A solid basis for discussion was provided by the presentation of the results of the latest survey of participation in higher education, prepared by Prof Pat Clancy and Joy Wall of UCD. The surveys have been carried out at six-year intervals since 1980 and the latest covers two of these surveys derived from responses by students to a question on father's occupation included in the CAO documents sent to applicants for third-level places.
In 1992 this socioeconomic question became the subject of a separate document issued in conjunction with the CAO documentation, and the response rate fell to 75 per cent. Finally, in 1998, when the questionnaire was no longer linked to the CAO documentation, the response rate fell to 67 per cent. There is evidence that this may have led to the emergence of a bias in the responses favouring the higher socioeconomic groups. However, this is unlikely to have had a major effect on the validity of the data. It certainly cannot explain more than a small part of the disappointing recent trend in socioeconomic participation revealed by the latest report. The progress made between 1986 and 1992 in reducing the disparity between different socioeconomic groups in participation in higher education seems to have suffered a setback in the latest six-year period.
The table below summarises the principal changes in participation that have taken place since 1980. For the sake of simplicity I have allocated the 11 socioeconomic groups into three broad categories. The first category includes the children of farmers, of employers and managers, and of people in the higher professions. The second includes children of people in other professions, of salaried employees, and of what are known as "intermediate non-manual workers". The third consists of the children of other non-manual workers and of manual workers - the groups that have traditionally had the lowest participation in higher education.
It will be seen from the table that between 1986 and 1992 considerable progress was made in widening higher education participation. The participation rate for the third group, which comprises mainly children of manual workers, more than doubled during that period from 11 per cent to 23 per cent. Just over half of the increase in entrants to higher education between 1986 and 1992 came from this group. But in the most recent six-year period, participation by this less socially advantaged group rose much more slowly: barely 30 per cent of the increase in entrants came from this source.
By contrast, group one - the children mainly of self-employed and professional people - increased its participation rate more rapidly in the latest period than between 1986 and 1992, by 20 percentage points, pushing it up to 82 per cent, which cannot be far off saturation point. This is a surprising and disturbing trend that is hard to explain.
One factor might be the impact of improved employment prospects on the willingness of the male children of some manual workers to opt for higher education rather than early employment. But as this disturbing male trend towards entering employment early rather than continuing in education has become pronounced only within the past two years, this new phenomenon can scarcely have been a major contributor to the development of participation in the years to 1998.
I believe there is now some reason to be concerned that this negative trend might persist. On the one hand the pull of employment, reducing the willingness of sons of manual workers to remain in secondary education, much less to move on to third level, has become pronounced in the past two years and, with full employment in the years ahead, seems likely to intensify.
Now the forthcoming decline of one-third in the 18-year-old age cohort - reflecting the drop in the birth rate between 1980 and 1994 - will reduce enormously the pressure on third-level places in the years ahead, but because of the factor just mentioned, the benefits of this could be heavily skewed. Instead of increasing higher education participation rate of the more able children of manual workers, the benefits of greater accessibility to third level now seem likely to accrue disproportionately to the less-qualified children of educationally motivated middle-class parents who at present fail to secure the points needed for third-level entry.
Such a development would not merely run against equity, it would also involve a substantial economic loss, for it would deprive our community of a currently underused intellectual resource - the huge potential that exists among intelligent children of manual workers.
I find it odd that this aspect of improved access to higher education is often widely overlooked. The argument for wider educational access on grounds of equity is well understood, but the loss of potential talent deriving from the effects of social deprivation is rarely mentioned. In the last couple of years a new and valuable approach to educational disadvantage has been used to try to reach out to the most deprived in our society. This is the development of special access provision for most disadvantaged young people in our society. How to deal with the educational aspect of the problem of poverty was the main theme of this week's conference, and it is a subject I shall return to in the near future.
But the problem of the deficiency of the means test applied to our general grants scheme, because of a political failure to address this issue, urgently needs to be addressed.
In last week's column, when criticising the failure of the media to cover the presentation made on the IGC to an Oireachtas committee, and the absence of RTE current affairs programmes on this issue, I should have acknowledged coverage by other journalists in the print media, in particular of our future representation in the European Parliament.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie