I wish to thank the Cathaoirleach for allowing me to raise this matter. I thank the Minister for coming in to us. It is my first time seeing the Minister in this House in this capacity and I am glad to see her. I hope she will be glad to see me by the time I have finished saying what I have to say. It is not intended in any way to be offensive. The debate arises from a proposal contained in the revised Estimates for Public Expenditure which I have never seen actually formally quantified in the sense of the global figure and the precise percentages being quantified but which is intended to bring RTC fees into line with university fees for reasons which to some extent are argued in Government documentation on public expenditure.
As one who has spent all his professional career working in a regional technical college the sort of sweeping assumption that there is a direct comparison between RTCs and universities is, to say the least, mind-boggling. I am sure, from the figures that are available to me, that the proposal contained in the Estimate for Education will result in many RTCs, and in the RTC of which I am a staff member and a member of the board of management, being required to produce 100 per cent more from their own revenue this year than was required in the previous 12 month period, an increase in the requirement to raise from £300,000 last year to about £600,000 this year in the amount of money to be generated from fees.
Before talking about that proposal I want to put it into some perspective. When the Investment in Education Report was published in 1965 it stated that technical education as such is largely absent from the country's higher education and in planning future development of higher education in the vocational education system the aim should be to provide alternatives to courses in the universities, or courses specifically designed to meet the requirement of professional bodies, but to design courses to meet specific needs of the country. In other words, a sector was envisaged which would be flexible, pragmatic, functional and related to needs as perceived in the country. That was the objective.
When the Steering Committee on Regional Technical Colleges reported in 1967 they stated:
Irish people generally have not had the opportunity to become technically skilled and the academic bias in the educational system has not helped. This leaves a serious gap in the stock of knowledge and skill necessary for the development of productive enterprise.
They summarised their views on the matter as follows. This is not a complete quotation. It is a section from it. They make one very interesting statement in that summary of views:
The availability of increased technical knowledge and skill at all levels is a necessary but not sufficient condition for further economic growth and the promotion of innovation and enterprise amongst the people.
They emphasised the promotion of innovation and enterprise.
The steering committee envisaged quite a startling development in this area of regional technical colleges and, of course, at the same time other colleges of technology and, in particular, what is now called the Dublin Institute of Technology, were envisaged to be developing. The steering committee envisaged that somewhere in the order of 15,500 students would be attending regional technical colleges in 1972 and somewhere close to 20,000 would be attending regional technical colleges in 1975. Nothing like those figures has even yet been achieved.
The figures that the steering committee envisaged eight years ago as being necessary to produce the levels of skilled manpower that this country would require as a necessary condition for economic development have still not been reached in 1983. That has resulted in an enormous increase in demand for places. For example, in my own college in Cork there were 3,000 applicants for 600 places a couple of years ago. The numbers would be somewhat different now. They are the most reliable figures that I have to hand. That is a success rate of 20 per cent, which is considerably less than that for students applying to the Central Applications Office for the universities where the success rate is of the order of 38 per cent. Statistically — and I would not like to push this too far — it is possibly more difficult to get into an RTC, in some cases, than it is to get into your choice of course in university. Statistics can be abused and I do not want to do that. The point is generally applicable that it is extremely difficult to get into an RTC, that the demand for places is now well in excess of the supply and that we have not, at this stage, come anywhere near the numbers that were envisaged by the steering committee in order to produce the supply of skilled manpower necessary to give us a proper base for economic development.
What has happened is that the transfer ratio between second and third level education has actually dropped. The figure in 1967 stood at 14 per cent. Today it is 12 per cent. What has happened is that the proportion of our young people transferring from second to third level education has actually dropped. At the same time we have developed a philosophy of third-level education which is entirely out of phase with the closest model available, which is in Britain. For instance, the relative positions of RTCs and universities in this country compare most unfavourably at least with Britain. For instance, in Britain, 25 per cent of students go to universities and 60 per cent attended the non-university third level sector. In this country the figures are exactly opposite: 60 per cent of second level students go to universities, 13 per cent to RTCs and a further 12.7 per cent to other technological universities. This again is an indicator of the need for growth and development in the whole area of non-university technological education. It is a sign or a symbol of its lack of development that, however we describe this sector, we end up talking about it in negative terms by comparison with the university sector. It is a negative comparison; it is the non-university sector or something like that. That is usually how we end up talking about it.
Yet, I have to say that, with 10 years of working in an RTC and therefore with the experience, because of transfers of students from other RTCs and of various contracts through my union and other ways, the RTCs have been enormously successful. There is no question about it. They have developed, virtually from scratch, courses in a huge variety of specialist technologies. They have done it very often in spite of a lack of planning, in the sense that the planning that was done in terms of provision of staff refresher courses, staff facilities, planning of equipment purchase, planning of extensions and so on was — at least at the level at which I was involved — virtually non-existent. They have succeeded in spite of extraordinary restrictions, in terms particularly of the expenditure of money where, for instance, you pay somebody £14,000, £15,000 or £16,000 a year which is the salary of a lecturer in an RTC at present. Yet it needs the signatures of about four people for that individual to be allowed to spend £25 or £30. If we pay people that sort of salary we ought at least give him a responsibility comparable to that of somebody on that salary in the private sector instead of tangling ourselves up in enormous bureaucratic knots when very often the expense involved in controlling that expenditure is far greater than the actual cost itself. What we end up doing is wasting the time — which is the major commodity — the very expensive time of individuals involved in third-level education who are being paid quite large salaries, although my colleagues in the RTCs will not thank me for saying that. I hope the Minister will not quote me in the wrong place for saying it.
Furthermore, the RTCs have been poorly financed, particularly in recent developments in the degree area which has been run on what can only be described as a veritable shoestring but which, in spite of that, have been more or less successful. I do not want to get involved in that area. The Minister is aware of some of the problems there.
Along came these proposals. Education cutbacks can be looked at in various ways. First of all, in this case, we have already produced the evidence that the actual commitment by the State to the technological sector, the RTCs and other areas is already inadequate. It is inadequate in terms of the plans that were drawn up initially. It is inadequate in terms of the expected need and of comparisons with other developed economies. Therefore to cut back in expenditure in an area where expenditure is already seriously and severely inadequate is wrong.
Secondly, to cut back on education in a country which has a higher proportion of its population in the younger age group than any other country in western Europe is unfair and wrong. It is unjust — which is a social argument — it is also economic madness if we are ever to provide proper employment for those in that age group. We cannot do it if they are not educated. There will not be any future employment for people who do not possess a high level of technical and technological education.
On the other side of it — and here I take issue with a range of economists who see education as social and therefore almost implicitly non-productive expenditure — by any rational criterion, if productive investment is investment which is calculated to produce a real return in terms of the creation of wealth to the State, then investment in education is a productive investment. It is only a narrow mechanistic view of productive investment which could say otherwise. Investment in education provides a real return in terms of a skilled manpower which is more efficient, more productive and therefore calculated to provide an increase in the wealth of the community. It is therefore a productive investment. Therefore, cutbacks on education are effectively a cutback, not in an area of current expenditure or of loss-making expenditure but in productive expenditure.
The precise implications of the fee area for the RTCs have never been teased out entirely in public. I know, in the case of one large regional college, if a 100 per cent fee increase were to be implemented — and that is the clear implication of the budget being proposed to that college by the Department of Education — then the proportion of the college's running expenses being generated by fees would be of the order of 17 per cent. There is a university close by that particular college and the proportion of the university's income being generated by fees would be only 13 per cent. We would then have the ludicrous position when a publicly-owned educational establishment was generating more of its income by 40 per cent from fees than a privately-owned educational establishment in the same town. To my mind, that is a total and fundamental contradiction of the whole idea of publicly-owned education. I suspect that it was not the intention. I suspect rather that there was a lack of analysis of the realities of fees in the third-level sector.
All the while there are rules, practices and procedures which inhibit real initiative at local level in this whole technological area. For instance RTCs are major centres of resources in the area of skilled technical manpower and in the areas of technical facilities. There is a large concentration of people with high levels of technological skills in those areas. Those skills could be saleable in the way that many universities are now generating substantial revenue by setting-up consultancy practices as part of the universities' operations in the market place. Yet, if an RTC were to do such an extraordinary thing as to set up a consultancy, if it were to generate an income of, say, £100,000 a year from that, the consequences for that RTC would be that, in the following financial year, the financial provision made available by the Department of Education would be reduced by precisely that extra £100,000. In other words, the consequence for any college of generating extra income itself is to have its grant from central funds reduced which, of course, is calculated to ensure that no such use of resources will ever be made.
Apart from the financial consequences of that, that necessarily results in a waste of resources, in the non-availability of a specialist service which should be adding to our development of productive investment. If we are going to have cutbacks, then it does not necessarily mean that we must have increased fees; there could be all sorts of possibilities of generation of revenue. Perhaps the private sector consultants who have acquired almost a monopoly at present — with the level of fees that would astonish the rest of society — would not be too happy with this sort of competition. Perhaps, therefore, we are not inclined to encourage it, as we often have been disinclined to encourage it. That is one major source of fees and it is only bureaucratic restriction which prevents it. There is no need to increase fees. In fact, fees, as they used to be in RTCs, were not a substantial part of revenue but they have jumped at an alarming rate in recent years.
Even though the decision to increase fees is both economically and socially almost impossible to comprehend, and while it may not be logical it is consistent, for instance, with the decision in the area of the European social funding of some students in RTCs, whereby a saving of £85,000 to this State will result in a reduction of £95,000 in EEC aid. Therefore, the net effect is to reduce the income to the State by the order of £10,000 or £15,000. That does not make sense to me. It was done; I do not understand why it was done with the consequences of the enormous human problems that would be generated by that decision: for the sake of £85,000, I do not understand why it was done. I am totally mystified by it. Why we propose to save money in a way which will just reduce our aid from the EEC, I do not know.
There are other important aspects of technological education. For instance, there is the interesting fact produced in the "Clancy Report" which indicates that there is a substantially higher level of participation in third level education in those counties where RTCs exist. I would not try to claim that this evidence is conclusive, but it is the only evidence available and, therefore, it is the best evidence we have. And the best evidence suggests that there is a substantially higher level of participation in third-level education where an RTC exists. The proposal of the Minister and of the Department to reduce substantially the——
