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Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 4 Jun 1970

Vol. 247 No. 4

Committee On Finance. - Adjournment Debate: University Fees.

This debate arises originally out of the Minister's statement as reported at columns 1318 and 1319 of the Official Report of 15th April, 1970. The Minister said:

The provision for grants for the colleges of the National University and Trinity College in 1970-71 has been made on the basis that the total income of the colleges should be augmented by an increase of 25 per cent in the tuition fees.

He added that there had not been a general overall increase in these fees since 1963-64. As a result of that, certain representations were made to him and, in replying to the debate, which he had opened in those terms as reported at column 63 of the Official Report of 28th April, the Minister said that he would like to say a few words about university students' fees and, having spoken generally, he said he had had a discussion with a deputation from the Union of Students in Ireland recently. He had promised them that he would consider fully the representations they had made to him. He had done so and he was satisfied that there was validity in one particular point they had made. He said:

This relates to students in the faculties in which higher fees are charged and on whom the increase would bear most heavily. I am prepared in the case of students in these faculties to make funds available to the universities so that the increase in each case might be limited to £10.

This raises a number of questions as to what procedure is to be adopted here. The fact is that, although the Minister said in his reply today, in one of his replies, that the universities were quite clear about this, the universities are not clear about this.

The predominant view in the universities appears to be that what the Minister means by this very vague statement is that he will provide certain funds out of which the universities will be able in each case, that is individually, to give refunds to students of part of the 25 per cent increase in fees which is to take place. On the basis of that interpretation of what the Minister said, which I must say was not my own interpretation of what he said, the universities have decided to proceed to increase fees by 25 per cent despite the Minister's announcement.

The first thing we have to establish is whether the Minister intends to say here that the universities can increase their fees by 25 per cent and that he will not object to such an increase, and indeed that he will encourage it, except in the case of certain faculties where the increases will be smaller, and that he will then increase their grant above what it would otherwise have been by an amount sufficient to cover that, or whether he is saying that they should go ahead with the 25 per cent increase and that money will be available to give refunds in individual cases. These are clearly two quite different propositions. The universities understand it in the latter sense and my own understanding is in the former sense. For the Minister to say that the situation is clear is, I am afraid, quite unjustified. The situation is very far from clear. The universities should be told what the Minister has in mind.

I should point out to the Minister that some of the difficulties here arise from suspicions in the universities in relation to the validity of this promise. The universities have had some unhappy experiences here. When the university fee grant scheme was introduced, the Minister's Department communicated with the universities—at any rate I can say communicated with my own college, University College, Dublin—and it was proposed that, to replace the county council scholarships being abolished and to make some kind of scholarships available to students who did not qualify under the means test, new scholarships should be introduced. The Department of Education made it quite clear in the discussions that took place that they would finance them.

To meet this request—it seemed a reasonable one—the universities instituted a scholarship scheme forthwith and without any hesitation or preparation. In fact, when it came to the point, the Department refused to accept any responsibility for the cost of the scholarships which had to be borne by the universities. That failure to implement the undertaking of the Department left the universities with some hesitation about accepting this kind of verbal assurances.

There was also the fact that even in regard to the fees themselves, when the Department under a previous Minister about three years ago said to the universities that they should not increase their fees as they intended to do and that they would give an additional grant to make up for this, the method of payment of this grant, a long time in arrears, and the way in which it appeared to the universities that their normal grants were adjusted to take account of this extra grant—and this should not have happened—has left the universities very suspicious of any offer of this kind. Quite understandably and properly they want to have in clear form from the Minister what he is proposing in this instance.

It is quite clear from what he said today that he has merely thrown out a phrase in this House and he has not made clear to the universities what he means by it. He said it is unambiguous and quite clear. I have shown it is not clear. Indeed, an interpretation has been put on it by the universities which I doubt is the Minister's intention. This needs to be clarified at this point. I should like the Minister to make it clear when this money is to be paid because the universities will not operate any scheme unless they get the money before the scheme comes into effect. My college's unhappy experience in relation to the scholarships has created a situation in which, unless the money is there in cash in front of them next October, they will be very reluctant to implement any scheme on the basis of some kind of verbal promise.

It would appear that the Minister's communications to the universities on this matter have been very limited. It appears that what has happened is that a copy of the relevant bit of his speech was sent to the universities. There was no accompanying letter, nothing to indicate how it is to be implemented and, according to the Minister today, it would appear that there will be no further discussions with the universities. This is a quite improper way to do business with any kind of body.

It is up to the Minister's Department now to draft a scheme or to make some kind of clearcut statement and to communicate in writing with the universities who, after their experiences with the scholarships, will not be satisfied with verbal arrangements of this kind, saying whether it is intended that they should not increase the fees and that he will provide money by next October to replace the amount of money they would have raised by a 25 per cent increase in the fees of the higher fee faculties, or whether they are to go ahead as they now intend to do and increase the fees and whether there is to be a scheme under which refunds will be given to students of the difference between the £10 increase in these faculties and the 25 per cent increase. That communication should be made.

I should also like to ask the Minister on what basis he arrives at this figure. He will be aware that the fees charged by universities range from about £65 to about £100. A £10 increase in fees in the higher fee faculties would clearly be a much smaller increase than a 25 per cent increase on the lowest fee. The lowest fee of £65 is such that a 25 per cent increase will give a fee increase of £16 5s. Was it the Minister's intention not alone to mitigate the bigger increases that would occur in absolute money terms in applying 25 per cent to the larger fee, but to go beyond that and actually to reduce the amount of the fee increase in absolute terms to a lower figure in the case of these faculties than in the case of the Faculty of Arts, and if so, why?

What thought or study has gone into this? What costings has the Minister studied that have led him to the conclusion that the fees should be increased in the case of arts students by £16 5s on £65 in the case of my college and by £10 on £100 in the case of some of the higher fee faculties? Is there some rationale behind it? If so, the Minister should explain it to us. Certainly Arts students will find it very difficult to understand why when, in fact, they are probably paying in the case of general Arts students a higher proportion of the total cost of university education already than any other group, because in view of the large scale of the classes in question and the limited number of lectures, the cost of education in a university for a general Arts course is very much less and is, in fact, a tiny fraction I suspect of the cost of a course in science.

The amount they are now paying, £65, probably represents quite a high proportion of the total cost, whereas the students in the more expensive faculties are already paying a much smaller proportion. Would the Minister like to tell the Arts students why it is that they who are paying a much higher share of the cost already, should have to pay a bigger increase, a two-thirds bigger increase in absolute terms, than the increase payable by students in the more expensive faculties who are contributing a much smaller share of the total cost? If there is a reason behind this, if it is a thought-out policy, let us hear it because all we have had so far is a throw-away remark from the Minister which is open to several interpretations and not yet formally communicated in any explicit form to any university.

Finally I should like to make a general point. The whole system of fees is quite unsatisfactory. The Minister will be aware that in the Investment in Education Report and, indeed, also in the Fine Gael policy, the method of financing university education at present has been severely criticised.

Under the present system, the position is that direct grants are paid to the universities which enable them to charge fees which are a certain fraction of the total cost of university education. This means that parents living in Dublin who have a reasonable income and who can afford to pay a fee of £65 and to keep their children at home can easily provide university education for their children. But other parents are still not able to get it so easily as they are living down the country. Even with the grants now given for children living down the country, and even if the parents are entitled to these grants because of their means, there is much more hardship attached.

The Investment in Education report advocated that university education should be available on the basis that fee grants should be given to each student to pay the full fee—that the full cost should be charged, averaging about £400 to £500 per student, varying with the faculty; that there should be no direct grant covering undergraduate education but that, instead, the students should get a fee grant of this amount which would entitle them to purchase university education at the university of their choice—direct grants being confined, then, to post-graduate and research work. This would have the additional advantage of ensuring greater autonomy for the universities who, by receiving the bulk of their funds via the students, would not be subject to the kind of direct controls implicit in an arrangement under which bloc grants are given and which is antisocial by creating a situation whereby parents who can afford to pay a threshold figure of £65 can provide university education for their children whereas other parents cannot. The whole system of fees needs to be reconsidered.

We should like a clear statement from the Minister on how this scheme is to operate and what steps he intends to take other than sending the universities a copy of an extract from his inexplicit speech in order to get this scheme under way.

I want to make a few remarks broadly endorsing almost everything Deputy FitzGerald has said. The Minister stated this device of the fee increase was designed to augment the income of the colleges. Like Deputy FitzGerald, I think this is a very extraordinary backhanded way of proceeding towards a superficially desirable end—augmenting the income of the colleges. It ignores a number of very important points, however, some of which were touched on by Deputy FitzGerald. In the first instance, it left the universities with virtually no choice and no room to manoeuvre as far as this increase is concerned: they were not consulted. Even now, their position is totally unclear. The Department have produced a very happy solution to some extent for it, but an ultimately unhappy one, I think, for higher education in general by which the necessary funds can be raised. The odium of the method by which they are raised can seem to fall on the university authorities themselves which is a highly undesirable state of affairs.

I also think that the Minister, in this rather ham-fisted action of his, is ignoring the fact that the kind of student in general now going to university is generally middle-class whose parents very often are of slender means. There is a dangerous tendency in Ireland to view the university student as a favoured upper-class animal. Increasingly, this is untrue. He comes from an ordinary Irish background. He is usually an Irish citizen in all our universities. Very often, as I say, the parents are middle-class, of relatively slender means. Certainly, they are no longer the kinds of aristocrats they used to be. They are students who are finding great difficulty in paying their way through college and whose parents have great difficulty in supporting them. Frequently, these students have to work through the holiday periods in order to sustain themselves. This sudden impost upon them is extremely severe and virtually unprecedented.

Is this to be a future policy of the financing of university education in Ireland? Will this exercise be repeated, without consultation, in the same way? Are we moving into a pattern of financing the universities essentially through the concept of the economic fee? Here, I dissent slightly from Deputy FitzGerald. I think the philosophy of the paying of the economic fee is dangerous and regressive except where adequate grants exist to compensate the student for his outlay.

That was my proposal.

In the absence of these grants, it is an extremely dangerous technique to adopt at the moment. I also think Deputy FitzGerald is perfectly right in arguing that a number of aspects of this scheme are totally unclear. What are the higher fee faculties? Presumably they are Medicine, Engineering, Agriculture and Science. Are these the faculties in respect of which the Minister intends to provide the university with the funds to make the repayment or are they not? We are entitled to be told these things quite clearly.

There is an extremely dangerous in-built tendency in the adoption of this whole differential approach. There is not time this evening to dilate on this point. There seems to be, in the thinking of the Minister in making this differentiation between two sets of fee structures, a value judgement about certain faculties and certain other faculties. I agree with Deputy FitzGerald that the parents of the arts students and the students themselves will wonder why they are differentiated against in this way. Is this part and parcel of departmental thinking which is moving increasingly into the sphere of thinking that the only form of tertiary education worth State subsidisation is in the scientific, technological or professional end of university teaching? If this is so, it is regrettable. It takes a view of the arts student and the traditional academic subjects, which I have noticed in recent ministerial pronouncements upon vocational and technological education, which is completely wrong. It sees them as academic ivory tower subjects. In other countries such as Britain and America, it is becoming increasingly to be seen that an arts training is very often at least as relevant a training for business and technology as a superficially professional technological degree. This morning, in the Federation of Irish Industries' Newsletter there is a suggestion to that effect— that many of the superficially professional courses of the kind the Minister seems to favour are not directly related to the end product, of service to the community which perhaps excessively dominates the Minister's thinking on university financing.

I want a clarification on the higher fee subjects. How and when will universities be financed on this? With regard to the slightly arbitrary and somewhat vague action by the Minister, he has, as in another recent instance, slightly hit at the relevance of the Higher Education Authority to his function as a Minister. He set it up. Fifteen selected and appropriately chosen people were given as chairman one of the most experienced educationists in this country. He did not consult them on the capital cut-back in his Estimates. Did he consult them? Is he consulting the Higher Education Authority on what are the higher fee faculties? Does he intend to, if he has not done so?

I must confess I find it difficult to understand why Deputy FitzGerald should consider it necessary to ask the type of supplementary questions in relation to this matter which he asked this evening on Deputy O'Leary's question and also why he found it necessary to raise this matter on the Adjournment. The Deputy is a member of the governing body of University College, Dublin. I find it equally difficult to appreciate why he could not deal with what I feel is a relatively simple matter. By implication, in his questions he infers that the governing body as a whole of University College, Dublin, is not capable of interpreting a relatively simple matter.

I could not agree with that interpretation of the Minister's statement.

Another reason why I find it difficult to understand the Deputy's raising of this matter here and also the fact that Deputy Thornley has asked a number of questions on the same matter, is because in fact a report indicating clearly what I intended appeared in the daily papers some time ago. In the Irish Independent of Thursday, May 28th, it got a banner heading. It was clear from the statement made on my behalf by the Department at that time just exactly what I did mean. I want to repeat that there was nothing ambiguous in my statement to Dáil Éireann about university fees.

I told the House I was providing grants to the universities on the basis of fees, which generally had not been increased since 1963-64, being raised by 25 per cent. In my concluding speech and again in my reply to Deputy O'Leary's question today I considered representations which were made to me by the Union of Students in Ireland, I was prepared to make funds available to the universities so that in the case of the dearer faculties the increase in fees might be limited to £10.

Perhaps that would be a part answer to the question asked by Deputy Thornley here in relation to the thinking of my Department. In the discussion I had with the Union of Students in Ireland this matter was referred to. I do not want to imply by that that the Union of Students in Ireland accepted any increase but as I made my case in relation to the matter this was one of the points raised by them. As I said at the beginning, I do not feel it should have involved any great exercise in higher mathematics to insure the subjects concerned would be limited to £10.

Which subjects?

I shall mention them in a minute. When the registration of students had been completed in October, the loss of revenue entailed in so limiting the increase in certain faculties could be ascertained and I would be requested to make good the loss by way of additional grants. I think that was the abvious answer and in fact Deputy FitzGerald himself said this is what he felt should be the interpretation of what I have said.

Do I understand the proposal is that the fee should only be increased by £10, not that it should be increased by 25 per cent and the refund given?

That is correct, that the fee should be increased by £10 and that in October when the students were registered the university could tell me at that stage what their loss of revenue was in relation to this matter and that I would make good this loss.

The Minister is aware that with very few dissentients the governing body of UCD interpreted it in the opposite sense.

It just shows that the Deputy and myself have much more sense than the governing body.

That is a very fair answer.

That is what I have undertaken to do and there should be no question of raising the fees by 25 per cent and making part refunds in certain instances.

The Deputy raised another matter here in regard to scholarships. The fact is that in relation to the amounts involved in the non-means test scholarships these were taken into account in connection with the annual grants. The Deputy asked me for the subjects. They are engineering, science and medicine.

Let me conclude by remarking that the two Deputies spoke on their Fine Gael and Labour policies and what they would do if they were in office. I cannot judge what they might do if they were in office but I can say that in so far as my party are concerned we have made a record amount of money available this year for education, approximately five times as much as was available when the coalition of Fine Gael and Labour went out of office. I would also mention that the universities would need to be very careful in relation to Fine Gael and Labour policies because the last thing done by the Fine Gael and Labour Parties when in office was to cut the grants to the secondary schools by ten per cent and the grants to vocational schools by six per cent. I am sure the universities will have a lesson to learn from that.

On a point of clarification, will this apply to veterinary medicine, architecture and dentistry?

It will apply, yes.

The Minister mentioned three faculties. There are others as well?

Yes. I mentioned three.

Agriculture?

Yes. It will be obvious to the universities what are the higher fee faculties.

It cannot be obvious unless the Minister states it. There is a scale of fees.

Surely the governing body will use their intelligence in relation to this, and I am sure they have a very considerable amount of intelligence.

Having used their intelligence, if the Minister says he does not agree with their judgment and will not pay, where are they?

The Dáil adjourned at 5.25 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Tuesday, 9th June, 1970.

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