Sorry for the quietness of late, academia’s been pretty awul but things should be more settled within the next few days. Meanwhile, I just wanted to share this email that I just sent to RTE’s Saturday View programme where Eamon Ó Cuiv was trying to defend the increase in third-level registration fees.
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As a full-time undergraduate student I feel that by allowing the registration fee to be raised, Batt O’Keeffe has completely sold the lower middle-classes down the river.
The Minister will be firmly aware that the Union of Students in Ireland has been lobbying for a rise in the threshold levels for third-level maintenance grants for years now, and last year’s raise was below the rate of inflation over the last few years. The blunt truth is because of Fianna Fáil’s inability to enforce its own legislative agenda, the Student Support Bill still lies on a shelf and students are being assessed on their parents’ income levels, and are often cut off by unreasable income limits.
Now the Minister has bottled out of introducing means-tested fees by instead raising the registration fee by nearly 60%. The very poorest, rightly, are spared from this expense, as they don’t pay a registration fee anyway. But the upper classes won’t miss the extra €550, and the poor won’t have to pay it – so the Minister has introduced a move that directly targets the middle classes who can’t just come up with an extra €550 per college-going child without having to tighten their belts elsewhere – especially when the Government has started to take money from these families elsewhere in the recent Budget.
Means-tested fees where those earning over €100k, although not a perfect solution, would have been a far more equitable solution than targeting those who don’t have the money to pay for the increase. In my University, UCD, 13,000 people out of 22,000 pay a reg fee: this extra reg fee gains €7.1m per year in extra revenue for UCD, a tokenistic inflationary gain that doesn’t go anywhere near covering their deficit. Means-tested fees would have meant a far greater gain for the University system while only taking from those who can afford to sign the cheques.
By increasing the registration fee instead of taking the braver, more ballsy step of introducing fees for those who can definitely afford to pay, the Minister has completely personified everything that’s wrong with the current Government: all talk about the most equitable and fairest solutions but when it comes to it, he just can’t bear to upset the upper classes.
Education should be a right and not a privilege – but in times like these where the country can’t afford to provide for it, surely making the lower middle-classes feel the hit most of all is just plain wrong.
I look forward to hearing the Minister’s defence.
Is mise,
