Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 9 September 2020
29. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science his plans to abolish third level registration fees in view of the fact that many students will not be attending lectures as normal, will have extra IT costs due to online learning and will find it more difficult to find work; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [22648/20]
View answerBy any standard, the students who enter higher education in 2020 will have a very greatly diminished student experience. Against that background, it is completely unjustifiable to charge the highest student contribution fee in Europe. It is completely unjustifiable to charge students anything at all but to charge them €3,000 a year when they have no ability to get part-time work, their family incomes may have been hit and they will have a diminished student experience is unacceptable. The Minister should abolish or dramatically reduce those fees.
I am aware of Deputy Boyd Barrett's views on this. I intend to address the funding for higher education, an issue that has been avoided for many years. A new Government and a new Department provide that opportunity. Issues around the registration fee are decided on through the budgetary process. I hope the Deputy will acknowledge that I have taken several measures to provide students with additional resources to meet the costs they face. We have doubled the student assistance fund, a progressive measure by any standards, from €8 million a year to €16 million a year; introduced the first dedicated technology fund to purchase 17,000 laptops for students; and increased mental health supports by €5 million, with a further €3 million included in the budget day announcement.
The previous Oireachtas was asked to look at the issue of the Cassells report and decided to ask for an economic evaluation of all the options. That work is due to be concluded at the start of 2021 and I will act on the findings. I do not believe we should go down the route of levelling students with lots of debt as they start out and I am not convinced that the student loan model works, either. More Exchequer funding is the general direction of travel. We increased Exchequer funding from €1.4 billion in 2015 to €1.8 billion in 2018. The cost of providing education will be higher this year. In a Covid world where we have to have fewer people on campus, a different way of doing things, IT licenses and all that, the cost will go up. We are not increasing the student contribution fee. I would like it reduced over the lifetime of the Government. There is a budget next month and, in the meantime, we are targeting a lot of additional resources at students most in need.
Germany, Iceland, France, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia and the Czech Republic have no student contribution fees. Spain, a country that was hammered by austerity, has an annual student contribution fee of €500 yet we are charging €3,000. Now we are going to be charging that for a hugely diminished third level experience for the class of 2020. Any additional funding is welcome but the key metric is funding per student. Under various Fine Gael Governments, that has dropped by 43%. The numbers in higher education are going up. They have doubled since 2000 and another 40,000 additional students in higher education are projected over the next decade. The actual funding per student has crashed. If the Minister wants to know why there is a mental health difficulty, at least part of the answer is the enormous pressure and stress, financial and otherwise, put on students because of the chronic underfunding of higher education.
We both agree on the need to increase funding for higher education. Let us be honest, though. Approximately 80% of the higher education budget is going on fixed staff costs and that is right and proper. The Deputy would be the first to tell me if that was not being addressed. We cannot pretend that the cost of providing the education system this year is decreasing, in fact, it is increasing. What we can do is look at ways of providing support. One of the things that is never said in these debates is that 44% of students in Ireland have their student contribution fee in full or in part paid through the Exchequer. Not every student is paying the student contribution fee. Some 44% of people are not; the most vulnerable, most disadvantaged and lowest income people are not paying it. I want to review the student supports and see how we can take more people out of the net of paying the contribution fee. Work is under way in that regard.
I just pointed out a number of European countries where they do not have a contribution fee. That is the standard we should reach rather than having the highest fees. The level of investment per student in this country for most categories of students is less than the amount of public investment into horses. I like horses but I prefer students. I think they are more important and they add something very significant over their lifetimes additional to Exchequer revenues and so on. We need to dramatically increase the investment. Where could the Minister get it? I will give him a simple idea. I have said this many times. Some €700 million and rising is going in research and development tax relief to a handful of multinational corporations that are already supremely profitable. Has anybody done a cost-benefit analysis of whether that €700 million is better going to Google, Facebook and Apple or to our public universities? I bet no one has but we should. I think we would find it would be a lot more socially and economically beneficial to this country.
I like horses and I too prefer students. That is why as Minister with responsibility for further and higher education within the first eight weeks in the job the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, and I have made a number of measures and initiatives to significantly increase the supports going to students. The model we have in place at the moment ensures that those on the lowest incomes, those most at risk of disadvantage, do not pay student contribution fees. We almost have a situation where nearly half of our students are not paying a contribution fee at all. I want to look at how we can build on that and how we can build a sustainable model based on public funding. There is a review due back at the start of next year which we have commissioned with the European Commission. It will provide us with a pathway as to how we can address this issue which, in my view, due to political cowardice across the divide has been avoided for far too long.
