Madam, - Despite the withdrawal of Mr Dempsey's proposal, the Minister has raised important issues about the relationship between college fees and third-level access which must still be faced.
There are two main dimensions to the abolition of third-level fees - social and educational. Even before fees were abolished, all the available data suggested that the measure would be extremely regressive in its income distribution aspects.
By 1998 the largest gains in participation in third-level education over 1992 were farmers, up 22 points to 75 per cent participation; employers and managers, up 17 points to 84 per cent participation; and higher professionals, up 15 points to 100 per cent participation.
The five low-participation social groups gained less than an 8 per cent increase in participation. The lowest gain was by semi-skilled manual workers, a 4 point gain to 23 per cent participation.
Three of the five low-participation groups had a dramatic reduction in rate of growth of participation in the 1992-1998 period compared with the 1986-1992 period when the policy emphasis was on the grants system rather than on fee abolition.
When the de Buitlear report found the grants system inequitable, badly administered and widely abused by those with large assets reporting low incomes, the report was sidelined. It remains the key to reform today but it must be accompanied by measures long before Leaving Certificate level.
A mythology at the time was that "free fees" would be financed by the abolition of covenants, that the tax shelter industry would surrender in return for free fees. I regret that the tax shelter industry grew from 57 write-offs in 1994 to 89 in 2001. The fastest growth has been in schemes where the Revenue Commissioners do not publish the cost. These grew from 10 in 1994 to 33 in 2001.
The second objective of the abolition of third-level fees was to end university autonomy by depriving the colleges of an independent source of income. Universities are today controlled by a growing army of external and internal bureaucrats - the high price of public funding. For relatively small fees our colleges produced graduates who competed successfully with US graduates who had paid fees of as much as $25,000 a year.
Now we have a situation in which neither taxpayers, graduates, nor students want to fund Irish third-level education and the heads of the universities are slavishly taking the bureaucratic rather than the scholarly path. The issue of quality depends on universities having funds other than from various State quangos and boards, some of which have "quality" in their titles.
In the so-called high-points faculties the "no fees" policy is even more regressive and inefficient than the policy as a whole. Contrived shortages of places on these courses have created huge monopolistic earnings for the protected occupations and raised the cost of their services to the community as a whole by severely restricting those who wish to invest in their own human capital. The Taoiseach referred to this problem at the Killarney IMI conference but should now face up to the policies which caused these problems.
Mr Dempsey had the courage to address issues which a more independent university sector would have addressed years ago. An ill-advised social policy has backfired and universities have been bureaucratised into submission, as was intended. It has to stop. - Yours, etc.,
Dr SEAN D. BARRETT,
Department of Economics,
Trinity College,
Dublin.