There is a lot of conversation among young and older people at present regarding the re-introduction of college fees for students and it is clear that young people are extremely concerned about their futures.
Fees were abolished for a very good reason in the past - in a bid to educate our society without the barrier of financial constraints. However now not only are we going to have a cash-strapped population, we are also going to have an uneducated cash-strapped population.
The knock-on effect of reintroducing college fees is enormous. Not only does it mean that many of our bright young students will not get the education and the chance they deserve to make something of themselves (and this is the biggest sin ), but we will also be left with a population that has little skill and is of little benefit to Irish, European or global business and academic life in the future.
We are also effectively knocking on the head any chance of inward investment to this country that we may have had as we will not have the educated and skilled manpower for the jobs. By introducing third level fees we are cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world and also telling young people that they are only entitled to be educated at third level if their parents have the money to pay for them.
What kind of a message is this to send to young people? Education has been the backbone of our economy throughout the Celtic Tiger years. It is no coincidence that the good years were the years that education was free in this country.
People who never thought they would go to college were educated. People who thought that they had missed their chance at education in the 50s and 60s returned to college as mature students and got the education they always knew they were capable of but had not had the opportunity to achieve. Young people who believed that they were not good enough for college but 'gave it a go because it was accessible' are now enjoying careers and professions they never dreamed would have been for them. People got opportunities to do well who would ordinarily have never been educated to this level because there were no fees as such.
In recent years, the registration fees and equipment and literature costs were expensive enough for students, leading to students taking out big loans from local credit unions and banks in order to pay the costs. The fees on top of this will simply make third level inaccessible to a large proportion of society - and this at a time when thousands have lost jobs and have joined the dole queues. Well, more room will need to be made in these dole queues because now young people will be leaving school and going straight onto the dole queue because there will be nothing else out there for them.
Parents of young people are reeling from the suggestion that fees will be introduced by the Government following the mini budget announcement in early April because the educational opportunities that they thought their children would get are now looking very unlikely indeed. Everyone knows that education is the key to getting along and the government is now intent on nipping all of that in the bud and curtailing our young people from getting ahead alongside their European counterparts. Education will be reserved for the rich and not necessarily the bright and the poor will be shoved aside to put their bored brains to work in menial jobs which do not excite or challenge them.
This is nothing short of a disgrace and the government should be made to look at the other options which have been tabled by other parties in a bid to reimburse our struggling economy, which was allowed to fall into this decline by the current power-holders. This is not a time for faffing around and the government needs to accept that it is not tackling the problem of our failing economy competently or on their own, and they may need the help of intelligent input from members of other parties in order to get out of this mess that it got itself and us into.
