Dr. Charles Larkin:

Yes, huge savings to the state is essentially the way it is calculated, so one must put a big health warning on those calculations. However, once one removes that, one tends to have better social cohesion effects and improved agglomeration effects in terms of innovation, which is what Professor Glaeser at Harvard University emphasises. There are those types of benefits.

The problem in Ireland is that we have very poor data. If we are to calculate these things, and Qiantao Zhang has been fantastic at this, we have had to create this from scratch through surveys. The OECD has some data. In the Central Statistics Office, CSO, there are gaps between income data and CSO data. I draw members' attention to one of the most precise studies of this, Elish Kelly's paper from the Economics of Education Review 2010, "The economic returns to field of study and competencies among higher education graduates in Ireland". That was driven entirely by survey data. There was no CSO component in this except what came from the census. The census has a difficulty in that while it tells us what people did at school, university and other higher education, it does not tell one how much they make. Most other countries count this.

That would be one of the elements in that regard. It is a very important component and it is something on which there must be much analysis. It has been discussed by the Carnegie Foundation in the United States since it began its studies in the 1970s. This has been a known quantity as an idea and there have been calculations since the early 1970s, even down to how much improved dental health one has as a result of going to higher education.