Upcoming Education Cuts

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Okay, I'm probably going to sound simple and uneducated but even if they put the registration fees up, people are going to apply for grants and if they get it they will get that fee refunded. So effectively the money is just going around in a circle from the student to the state and back to the student ?!? this is not raising money is it?
However I will agree that anybody who's parents earnings are just above the level to qualify for a grant will be the ones hit.

And we have been hearing for the past couple of years that people should retrain and stuff... How are they actually making that possible by raising fees and cutting grants? They dont even have jobs for the graduates of today and by the looks of it there will not be many jobs left in the country by the time they are finished with all the cuts..

Sandvich wrote: »

Education's the worst thing to cut if you're supposedly having to move to a "Knowledge based economy" to recover, I thought this would be obvious.

I see this phrase "knowledge based economy" thrown around all of the time. What exactly do you mean by this?

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Honours maths used to give a points bonus for the LC results, that would be easy to reinstate.

Secondly higher education needs to be as low cost as possible, preferably free, with much less of an emphasis placed on liberal arts degrees and that sort of thing. This is because the majority of taxes are paid by higher earners, who are also mostly third level graduates. Its a ridiculously good investment by any government.

SSR, don't bother, we already know your vision of the future is one of a jackboot stamping on a mortarboard, forever.

Amhran Nua wrote: »

Honours maths used to give a points bonus for the LC results, that would be easy to reinstate.

Secondly higher education needs to be as low cost as possible, preferably free, with much less of an emphasis placed on liberal arts degrees and that sort of thing. This is because the majority of taxes are paid by higher earners, who are also mostly third level graduates. Its a ridiculously good investment by any government.

So you want a focus on math and science (expensive) instead of liberal arts (cheap) but you want the expensive math and science programs to be cheap because people will end up making a lot of money? Forgive me if I am not following your "logic" here.

Amhran Nua wrote: »

SSR, don't bother, we already know your vision of the future is one of a jackboot stamping on a mortarboard, forever.

That is a ridiculous characterization of my position on higher ed. But I have noticed that your general response to posts that you disagree with is to belittle their position without substantively responding to their main points, and then keep repeating the same thing over and over again without any kind of backup support or connecting logic.

If you would actually bother to read what people write, rather than what you want to respond to, you would have noted that I attribute the existence of powerhouse science and engineering universities in the US to generous support from the US government at a national and state level. But government support for education does not necessarily mean that they directly subsidize fees. Yes students in the US pay fees, but they are subsidized (this is also the case in Asia). But the big land-grant state-funded public universities are the campuses that have long forged ties with industry, and have helped drive innovation in the US for the last 150 years. It is also a key aspect of the "knowledge economy" model that countries like Ireland claim they want to emulate (but I suspect is just another buzz term that will lead to more quangos and junkets, but very little actual change in the education structure).

Amhran Nua wrote: »

But you yourself pointed out in another thread that a highly educated workforce was a key element in economic growth, to which I responded, why would you then want to erect barriers to high amounts of third level education. Maybe you could respond in this thread?

Because I don't see fees as a barrier for most people who are going to college.

1) The eradication of fees had no impact on the number of poor children who could attend university in Ireland. Instead, it freed up financial resources for middle class and wealthy families that could be invested in extra tutoring and private secondary education in order to better prepare their children for the LC., subsequently making it even harder for poor children to compete.

2) Because the lifetime earnings for college graduates far outstrips those for non-graduates, any rational individual should be willing to pay something now in order to have a greater payoff later. In countries where there is a clear return on investment to higher education, fees are not a barrier to entry. The US, Japan, and South Korea are three examples. If there were a statistical relationship between the rate of fees and college attendance, then the US and Japan should have the lowest college attendance rates in the industrialized world, and that is not the case.

3) I also do not think it is an accident that fee-paying universities by and large outperform non-fee paying universities in pretty much any national or international ranking system. The notable exceptions are Cambridge and Oxford, but frankly given their history and reputation they (and most Ivy League schools) are outliers in this debate.

Ultimately I do think having a well-educated workforce is important. But I also think that having fiscally strong universities that can not only educate students, but can drive innovation and economic development are also important. In the long run, I think this matters more than paying individual fees, both for the students who attend university, and for society at large. I do not think that Harvard-style tuition is sustainable or appropriate, but a completely free, no-strings-attached system is just not sustainable long-term.

However, for Ireland to re-introduce fees, they also need to have some kind of integrated direct loan/financial aid system that is means tested; it is not fair to simply throw people off of the system in the middle of the year. Unfortunately, this would have been easier if they had dealt with the fiscal situation in a realistic fashion two years ago.