Professor Tom Collins:

To clarify a few statistics, approximately 48% of students that enter the institutes now have not come directly from the leaving certificate. There is a huge problem in Irish higher education around funding, which the committee will have heard about earlier. It is also important to say that there are complementary roles that different people in the binary divide play and do. Professor Cunnane made the point about access being the norm is what institutes of technology do. This is not necessarily widely understood. One of the problems the sector has is that most of the staff in it are themselves university trained. In many situations such as policy fora, people have come from a university background. Increasingly, if we look at the guidance debate, a minority of guidance counsellors have been trained in the institute of technology sector. The Chairman mentioned public awareness and perception. There is a really serious challenge not just in the wider public, where I think that is better shared, but in the decision making public regarding the perception of the sector.

On access, currently 36% of all intake into the institutes are either from white collar, manual, semi-skilled or unskilled work backgrounds. The equivalent figure in the university sector is 25%. If we look at the figures for those drawn from managerial, employer and professional backgrounds, the figure is 43% for universities and 27% in the institutes.

As a final point, much of this debate is about how we transfer resources from the few to the many, which is what an effective state does. An ineffective state transfers it from the many to the few. The weighting for a medical student today under the HEA funding model is 2.3 in the clinical years. A medical student who is in a hospital and working mostly off the campus is carrying a weighting of 2.3 on the unit cost which the State is paying. The unit is basically based on a unit payment of 1 for an arts and humanities student. Then we wonder where the medical students are recruited and selected from and we have an interesting debate about the transfer of resources from the many to the few. The debate is central to the work. I want to elaborate on Professor Cunnane's point. If we begin to work through the data, we will find that there is a subvention in higher education funding that is, I would say, currently generally regressive in terms of its social impact. This strikes me as being an issue that probably could have been more closely examined in the wonderful work done by the Cassells group.