Gavan Reilly: Students and spin: when is a fee not a fee?
When you’re knees-deep in student politics at college, you tend to think you have the run of the world: nobody happens without you confidently asserting that you understand not just what is happening, but why it’s happening and for whose benefit.
With the benefit of time, you realise that isn’t quite the case. The more you know, I’ve learned, the more you realise you don’t know.
Alongside the things you ascertain for certain are the infamous ‘unknown unknowns’. It’s a trait that’s further bred into you when working in a newsroom under a libel system that ingrains caution at every turn.
The perspective of older years has underlined that there aren’t a huge number of times where being a former students’ union activist has come in handy in my day job. That said, spending a few years hanging around the windowless corridor of UCD Students’ Union does mean you remember a few things.
One of those things is the origin of what is now charitably called the ‘student contribution’, the subject of some internal coalition handwringing in the last few weeks. The annual €3,000 contribution has had a few one-off reductions in recent budgets, ostensibly as a cost of living measure.
The title is important, because in the last few days there’s been a change in language. The new minister for higher education, James Lawless, has allowed this to be referred to as a ‘student fee’.
It would be fair enough, that’s what the student contribution actually was – but it’s not. That €3,000 is not the fee for a college course, because your standard undergraduate course also has fees – the standard fee for students in UCD is now €5,880.
This is easily forgotten because for first-time EU students, the government pays the fee. The college gets the money, and the student is bypassed.
So what’s the other €3,000 then, if not fees? Your wisened columnist remembers when it was merely a ‘registration fee’, meant to cover bureaucratic costs – a mere IR£50 when first introduced. Not alone has it ballooned over time, it’s been rebranded to have people mistake it for something it’s not.
This raises a follow-up question: what is the €3,000 annual payment actually supposed to cover? Is €3,000 in extra funds per year, on top of the actual tuition fee, really necessary? How are colleges using it? Couldn’t, or shouldn’t, those costs simply be covered by the actual tuition fee, which might perhaps be increased, but still covered by the Government and thus sparing hardship from the student?
And, separately, if the Programme for Government commits to cutting the payment year on year, why is the minister appearing to rule out such a cut already – three months before the Budget is signed off on at all?
The starting gun hasn’t been fired on negotiations and yet James Lawless – helming the same Department that Simon Harris ran for four years – seems to be giving up on a quest for extra income to protect students and their families.
And people wonder why younger voters so often support the opposition?…