Professor Don Barry:

I am glad you said my colleagues could help to answer some of these questions. I will select a few that I feel comfortable addressing.

Senator Ruane asked why we were advocating for an income-contingent loan. The primary reason for doing so is that we see higher education as providing a clear public gain and a clear private gain. We feel that the public gain should be funded by general taxation and the private gain should be funded by those who accrue the private gain. One of the defining characteristics of an income-contingent loan, which makes it quite different from what we normally understand as a loan, is that one does not pay until one is earning enough money to make it feasible to pay.

This also relates in some sense to the question the Chairman asked about access. Nobody in this country could be content with the current situation with access to higher education from certain sectors of society, which are often described as disadvantaged. Whatever we are doing at the moment is not getting the country anywhere close to where we should aspire to be. This is a very serious matter for the committee to consider. The committee might want to reflect on what we are proposing and the Cassells report is also proposing, which is to try to identify why people from disadvantaged sectors of society do not attend in greater numbers. We consider that one of the reasons is that maintenance costs that apply to students attending universities are very high, as is the opportunity cost in terms of their chance to take a job that does not require higher education, but provides an immediate injection of funding into their family circumstances, which often can be quite strained.

The redistribution of funding that we are considering would mean there would be much larger and more targeted maintenance grants to people who really need them. We need a proper description of the income-contingent loan and a clear understanding that it is not like taking out a loan to buy a car. Those taking out the loan only pay it back when their income exceeds a certain amount. If a person's engagement with higher education does not lead that individual to achieving the private gain, then they do not pay anything. Basically poor people will not be paying student debt. There is limited evidence, but the evidence from the income-contingent loan system recently introduced in the UK, for much larger fees than anything we think should be countenanced here in Ireland, and in Australia, which has been running for a considerably longer period of time, is that it has no effect or improves the number of applications form disadvantaged students.

I do not know if the meeting is just us answering all these questions now or whether there is a conversational style. We answer the questions. I ask Mr. Costello to say something about the action plan for education and the national training fund.