Some 25,000 students took to the streets last month to protest against the hike in college registration fees, and to express their opposition to the reintroduction of tuition charges.

The march was a big one – by some distance the most successful students have run in years. And it hit the headlines the next day, with most objective observers agreeing that the Gardai overstepped the mark crudely and unnecessarily batoning some of the protesters. But the real story about educational discrimination never makes the headlines. Two Thirds Of People from Neilstown Left Education Before the Age Of 16 doesn’t exactly have a ring to it. Or what about: “Upper middle-class professionals make up only 5% of the population, but their children take up 32% of first-year places in medicine.” It’s hard to imagine it on the front page of The Sun...
The students who took to the streets believe they were there to make a point about equality of access to education. Essentially, the students’ position is that hiking fees will make education the preserve of the wealthier. Union of Students Ireland (USI) President Gary Redmond said as much earlier this year, when he warned that reintroducing tuition fees would “force thousands of students to drop out of college” and would “act as a major barrier to higher education.”
He might be right. The recession knows no demographic boundaries and lots of middle-class families are feeling the pinch. If a father or mother has been forced out of work, finding the extra €500 may well be beyond less well-off middle class students. But there is another battle-ground worth considering too.

Determined By Class
Earlier this year, the UCD economist Kevin Denny published a study entitled What Did Abolishing Fees In Ireland Do? The answer was not what idealistic students might want to hear.
“In Ireland, the abolition of fees did not change the effect of SES [socio-economic gradient] on university entrance,” Denny wrote. “The only obvious effect of the policy was to provide a windfall gain to middle-class parents who no longer had to pay fees.”
There is something understandably attractive about the universality of ‘free’ third level education. This is especially so when the need that some students feel to get away from home and live independently is taken into account – once you introduce a Means Test, students are in effect tied to their parents.
But the reality is that since students from low-income backgrounds didn’t have to pay fees anyway before 1996, it made little or no difference to them that fees were abolished.
In his study, Denny also points out that the rate of participation in third-level education more than doubled from 20% in 1980 to 44% in 1994 (an increase of over 100%), before the abolition of fees. Since the abolition of fees, the rate of increase has slowed to the current figure of 66% (an increase of exactly 50%). Logically however, not too much should be read into this: after all, the pent-up demand was far greater in 1980; and, equally logically, the higher participation gets, the lower the rate of increase is likely to become.
That said, the results of a 2009 study are instructive: it showed that of all OECD countries, the correlation between the educational attainment of individuals and that of their parents is strongest in Ireland. In other words, the abolition of fees was not sufficient to beak the glass ceiling that exists here for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The hard fact is that access to third-level education in Ireland is still, fees or no fees, largely determined by class. Last year, the Higher Education Authority (HEA) found that courses for the professions here are overwhelmingly dominated by the children of professionals. Students from that socio-economic background made up 32% of first-years in medicine, 27% in veterinary medicine, 23% in law and 19% in pharmacy.
The secondary school league-tables published recently in the Irish Times told the same, depressing story. Less than 15% of students from working-class areas like Cabra, Ballymun and Blanchardstown went on to third-level, while the progression rate was close to 100% in affluent suburbs on the south side of Dublin.

Level Playing Field
One school that is bucking this trend is Killinarden Community School in Tallaght. Nearly 30% of its Leaving Cert students went on to third-level last year, even though the school is classified as disadvantaged by the Department of Education.
Each year, 10 or 12 fifth-years and sixth-years are selected for an access programme connected to UCD and IT Tallaght. These students get access to the opportunities middle-class kids have effectively as a matter of course – things like after-school study, grinds-style extra classes in Maths and Irish, and revision courses at Easter.
“What we do is level the playing field,” explains the programme’s co-ordinator, Eamon Nolan, adding that the access programme has created a culture whereby going to college is now a normal aspiration for the Killinarden Community School kids.
“It changes the whole balance in the year group, by putting the focus on going to third-level. It’s building a profile of kids being successful, but also showing that, if you want to get there, you have to do the work, do the after-school study. In an area like this, where there’s no tradition of going to college, it’s important to see you can get there and survive and thrive,” he says.

A Self-Interest Group
Given the extent to which the educational system at primary and second level ingrains inequality, breaking that cycle should be the first target for progressive educationalists. The fact is that, as things stand, kids from Moyross, Finglas, Knocknaheeny and similar places are unlikely to go on to third-level, free fees or not. They are surely, therefore, the ones most in need of State support.
One somewhat cynical view is that students are a selfish interest group, no different than, say, wealthy pensioners who want to keep their medical card, or public sector workers who don’t want to lose their generous pension schemes.
There’s nothing wrong with this. We live in a democracy.
But the evidence clearly suggests that it is wrong to equate the fees issue with a battle for educational equality. Because if equality was the objective, students would be protesting for smaller class sizes in junior infants, or more special needs teachers, or after-school programmes in disadvantaged areas, or an end to State support for fee-paying primary and secondary schools.
The strongly pro-active approach taken in Killinarden seems to be what is needed to get kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to do the Leaving Cert, approach it seriously enough to get a decent result and progress to third-level education. Eamon Nolan suggests that fees from the wealthiest people should be redirected into access programmes like this, and into expanding the grants system to support less well-off students.
With more money, the Killinarden access programme could involve more students, and intervene in first and second year, rather than at Leaving Cert level.
By contrast, in terms of promoting equality, eliminating fees and hoping everything would come right has totally ineffective. It was a laudable experiment, but all the evidence shows it has failed.