Hunt Report: draft available

A draft of the long awaited Hunt Report is available here. The draft is dated August 8th so it possible that the published version will differ: after all why else wait 5 months?
It is a long report and covers a lot of ground so I haven’t read it all carefully. But from what I can see it is a lot like other such reports, fairly bland and uninspiring. There are many worthy statements that no one is likely to disagree with. That’s a bad sign in my view. Whether it adds much, or differs much, from the OECD’s recent report I don’t know. The committee that produced this report, though containing a range of very able people, looks to be dominated by insiders to the system. That’s also a bad sign in my view.
I confine my views to the issue of access to higher education by low income/low SES groups. This is mentioned in a few places. On page 13 it recommends widening access by such groups “by additional weighting”. What this means does not appear to be specified unless I have missed something.
Section 1.3 discusses “Broadening participation in Irish higher education”. Table 2.1 shows the dramatic differences in access rates by socio-economic background. This is all very well known but worth reminding ourselves of nonetheless. While it comments that pursuit of equality has been a mainstream concern of policy since 1966 it declines to mention that policy in this area has systematically failed, hence Table 2.1. After 40 years of failure, is some readically new thinking not required? This is something of an oversight.
As far as I can the only other place this issue comes up is Section 9.2, page 99 in the section “Maintaining equality of access”. The word “maintaining” should really be “achieving” since you cannot maintain something that has never existed. It comments that “One of the principal barriers for entry to higher education affecting students from lower income groups is their relatively lower levels of school completion and lower levels of attainment in the Leaving Certificate”. Well yes but it would be more precise to say, since this has been demonstrated, that it is THE principal barrier.
What this means, is that the problem with improving access to third level education lies elsewhere, in first and second level education (if not before). It may well have been beyond the remit of the report to recommend changes there but at least it should have noted this.
It comments further that “…students from lower income groups who do achieve the necessary prior levels of attainment, financial constraints… can and do affect participation. These financial barriers, which can be significant…”
No evidence to support this is given. It seems unusual that statements like this are made in an important document but with no reason to take it seriously. I suspect that this is because no such evidence exists & evidence implying the opposite does exist. It has been demonstrated that the abolition of university fees was not associated with a change in the socio-economic gradient in university access which suggests to me that fees are a side-show.

Who gets the higher education grant?

The Irish Independent has an interesting piece on the socio-economic background of higher education grant recipients. In particular it documents how a significant number from professional & employer backgrounds receive the grants, more in fact than from semi- & unskilled backgrounds.

Education and the budget

Lots could be, and doubtless will be, said about the budget. But it is worth looking at some of the changes regarding education. The increase in higher level fees is 500Euro and only for the first child in the family (no increase for the second kid). So the government has gone out of its way to protect the relatively well off who dominate university. Meanwhile the Educational Disadvantage Budget has been slashed by 60% and student grants are to be cut by 4%.
Well at least you know what the government's priority is: protect the middle class.

Shocking news about progression to university in Ireland

The news from this years' Irish Times "feeder lists" is... well not news at all since it tells a depressingly familiar tale of unequal access to university.
Going to university and higher education generally is not, of course the be-all and end-all of secondary education but the government does not allow any other comparative data on educational attainment to be published at the school level, lest people be allowed to make informed decisions.

"Free college tuition has failed to open doors to all"

Sean Flynn in the Irish Times today emphasizes that socio-economic factors are still key in deciding whether someone attends university or not.

How education policy is made

Martin has posted a link below to a very interesting lecture on Research and Policy Making given by Frances Ruane, director of the ESRI. The following observation I found striking:

"Getting something into the ‘programme for government’ in effect ensures that a policy is likely to be adopted, but perhaps just as importantly, has the effect of terminating any substantive debate subsequently on the issue. From what I can see, this is what happened to the De Buitléir Report on student grants mentioned earlier: there was a commitment to increasing access to higher education in the 1993 programme (which led to the report being commissioned) but in the negotiations of the 1995 programme that shifted to a commitment to ‘free fees’. This decision ran counter to the report’s evidence that this approach would not be the most cost effective or fair way of improving access, and consequently the report was kept out of the public domain until after the decision was made. What can we learn from this? Unless research is publicly available to inform the ‘programme for government’ process, its potential influence may be quite limited; even when it is available, it may be ignored."

The general theory of stupidity, university fees and utter baloney

This Irish Times article discusses the Green Party's apparent aversion to a new system of student charges that - apparently- the government is considering introducing. The proposal is for a new "student contribution fee" on top of the existing student registration charge.
According to their spokesman, a Mr Gogarty, this would conflict with the Program for Government which agreed that “This Government will not proceed with any new scheme of student contribution to third-level education.” Yes, it certainly sounds inconsistent.
The spokesman adds " “We have conceded that the new student charge that’s coming in is going to be higher than the registration fee it replaces, but the question is, how much higher? If it is too high, then it’s basically fees by the back door....That’s non-negotiable as far as I am concerned,”

A fee is a fee whatever you call it. Just as calling a tax a "contribution" or a "levy" makes no difference. So if you concede that there is a new charge being introduced then it is a fee on top of the fee that is already there. To say "if its too high then it's basically fees by the back door" is risible in my view. It is fees by the front door and irrespective of the level set.
And what is "too high" anyway? If it was €10 would that be too high? Eh, no. €10,000? Eh, yes. So it is negotiable actually.
In the discussions about how the government's book-keeping deals with expenditures related to the banking rescue it has been emphasized again and again that international markets see through any creative accounting. These people are not stupid. Likewise students and their parents are not stupid: they know a shake-down when they see one. So why is it so hard for politicians to be transparent and honest about such an important issue?
It seems that the "Fees debate" will continue to attract incoherent thinking, dissembling and general woolly-mindedness.

Deferred fees for universities:a UK proposal

The issue of university fees and financial support for students is both complex and divisive. The need for some original but well-thought-through ideas has never been greater. The UK is also re-assessing its system of student financing. A recent proposal by Neil Shephard (Oxford University) is worth looking at. Its recommendations are below:

1. Make student financial support available to cover all tuition and a modest cost of living.
2. Allow graduates to repay according to earnings with protection for poorer graduates.
3. Call HEFCE teaching grants “scholarships” and make students aware of their value.
4. Cap the level of funded fees plus HEFCE grant at the current level.
5. Allow universities to charge deferred fees.

• When they are paid the money goes to the student’s university not to the state. These
• fees have no fiscal implications.
• Bring some of the cash flow from deferred fees forward by working with a bank.

6. In the long-run move to making the cost of living support simpler by

• Providing more realistic cost of living support for all students.
• Removing means-tested university bursaries for cost of living expenses.
• Removing means-tested grants to students provided by the state.

"If we had to pay fees, we'd take it more seriously"

In the sometimes heated disputes about the abolition of university fees & their possible re-introduction the focus is generally on the effect that it might have on progression to university and on the issue of educational inequality. There has been relatively little discussion about how student behaviour might change.
The Irish Times has an interesting article by Roisin Ingle based around interviews with students in UCC and one theme that emerges is that students might take their courses more seriously if they were paying fees. Another theme was that while some students saw the merits in the re-introduction of fees there were very strong social pressures not to reveal this.
Of course one cannot infer anything from a few interviews like this but the article is nonetheless worth reading.

Social class and educational attainment of Irish children

It is well known that children from high SES backgrounds do much better in school and this explains, at least proximately, the very sharp SES gradient with regard to university entrance. Or, to put it in English, working class kids get, on average, much worse Leaving Certs and this is why they are much less likely to get to uni' and certainly less likely to get into the more remunerative professional programs. The recent hullaboloo about "Free fees" , on the occasion of my paper on the subject, more or less ignored this inconvenient truth.
But when in the lifecycle does disadvantage set in? Clearly it doesn't just happen at 18. The Growing up in Ireland data allows us to take a snapshot of this gradient when children in Ireland are about 9 years of age.

This graphs the mean maths score by household social class and one can clearly see a pronounced association. Social class is based on the highest class of the two parents - if there are two around. Even at age 8 or 9 coming from a professional/managerial household makes a big difference. Alternatively one could look at the education of the primary carer (usually the mother):

Its still the same old story: if your parents have low education then you are at a considerable disadvantage. Doing some simple multivariate modelling, both factors have an independent effect, as does income and other variables. Girls do worse for example though as is well known the reverse seems to be the case when it comes to doing the Leaving Cert.
To get an idea of the magnitudes involved, the mean and standard deviation of the maths test (which is the Drumcondra test) are respectively-0.64 & 0.92 respectively. When one does the regressions one finds that a child of a graduate mother can expect a score that is about .5 higher than a child of a mother with only minimum education (so about 55% of a std dev). For social class the gradient is flatter: the average difference between the top and bottom social classes is about .26. By comparison, the "penalty" to being a girl is 0.1.
Whether the childrens subsequent education exacerbates or reduces this pattern we cannot say. But Jim Heckman, for example, has argued strongly in favour of dynamic complementarities i.e. that learning begets learning which implies that, if anything, early inequalities get worse over time.
So one lesson from all this is I think, that early intervention is necessary if we are serious about addressing socio-economic inequalities in education. Alls we need to do is get serious about it.