PRESIDENT'S LOG:The truth is that 'free fees' are nothing more than the transfer of resources from the poor to the wealthy, writes FERDINAND von PRONDZYNSKI

SO, DEAR READER, this is going to be the last occasion for me to assault you with my views on this page before it winds up for the summer; and indeed it is my last chance to do so as President of DCU. By the time we meet again in this space in the autumn, DCU will be under new (and, I predict, highly successful) leadership and I will have faded into the shadows.

For today, I am going to ask you to sit down and hold tight, maybe with a glass of water to hand should you need it, because I am going to express some strong opinions.

As a society, we are failing those we most need to help in the education field, and frankly we don’t seem to give a damn. Unless we change and change fast, we will rightly be branded a disgrace. We all share responsibility for this. So what am I so exercised about? Let me go back for a moment to the 1970s, when I was a fresh young student in one of Dublin’s universities. As I have pointed out before, we were the elite. The people in my class were lovely people, and many have remained friends, but I cannot for a moment pretend that we were representative of the wider population in Dublin and beyond. Most of our parents were professionals, or business people, or people who had inherited wealth.

Managing an elite system of higher education is a doddle, relatively speaking. The students are bright and articulate and have that easy self-confidence that comes with a comfortable upbringing. Even when one or two of them are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier they still look good and make you feel comfortable.

As time went by we became aware that we couldn’t go on like this. A higher education sector that perpetuates social privilege just won’t cut it in a modern society, and a country that wants to attract investment needs much larger numbers of skilled people and much fewer signs of socio-economic disadvantage. So what did we do?

We started to push participation targets in third level upwards, and we abolished tuition fees. Happy days, now everyone was going to be able to go to college and we would have a country of genuine equality of opportunity.

But what actually happened? Of course we know that participation in higher education grew rapidly, and now amounts to over 60 per cent of the age cohort, and in many ways it is a great achievement.

In particular, the new policies encouraged and helped the children of middle income families to go to college without creating the same extreme financial pressures that would have existed before. Perhaps even more than that, the children of professionals and managers got another encouragement, and for all intents and purposes 100 per cent of these are now in third level.

But the disadvantaged? No, they haven’t benefited in the same way. In fact, they haven’t benefited at all, because between 1998 and 2004 participation levels of those from a “non-manual” background (the lowest socio-economic grouping) actually fell by three percentage points.

Or if you look at it geographically, in the areas close to DCU like Finglas and Ballymun, higher education participation rates run somewhere between 5 and 7 per cent. In the most recent figures released by the Higher Education Authority, we can again see a decline in third level participation by those from non-manual, skilled manual and semi-skilled backgrounds.

This is where we need to hang our heads in shame. We know that inclusive higher education is a necessary ingredient of both economic success and an equitable society. But what do we do? We maintain so-called “free fees” so that we can focus our currently declining resources on the middle classes, while we neglect the disadvantaged.

Mind you, the universities have stepped up to the plate. Over 20 years ago DCU started the first (and still the largest) access programme, and the other universities later followed suit.

We fund these programmes from private resources, with very little support from the State. And important though these individual initiatives are, and grateful though I am personally for the many donors who support them generously, it is not enough.

As a country we have decided that protecting politicians from the wrath of middle class voters is more important than doing the right thing. We have decided to market “free fees” as a socially progressive thing, but it is nothing of the kind.

It is a transfer of resources from the poor to the wealthy. We are cutting off equal opportunities for the disadvantaged, and we seem to be totally at ease with this choice.

In the end, if we cannot accept that this is immoral, we should at least understand that it is unproductive: maintaining an educational under-class is never a good idea. We need to bring this to an end, and we need to do it fast.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is president of Dublin City University. His 10-year term ends in July. This column returns after the summer break