Dr. Aed?n Doris:

I raised the issue of students increasingly working and that is one of the issues that struck me. As I said, I believe Covid has exacerbated that. The fact that we had to move learning online so suddenly gave students an opportunity to work. That masked what was happening to accommodation costs during the period of Covid. When they came back, they found the accommodation to be completely unaffordable. Maynooth University has a lot of first generation students. It has more than the other universities and is similar to some of the institutions in the IT sector in that regard.

We have more students on grants, for example, than any of the other universities. Perhaps I am more exposed to it than people in other universities would be, but I have had students tell me they cannot have continuous assessment done because they are working full-time or have been working very long shifts over the previous week and will try to get the work done next week, to give an example.

It is definitely impacting on students. When we assess access, we find that Ireland has quite a good record in getting students into higher education, by international standards. We should be very proud of that. The HEAR scheme has been particularly useful in that respect and the universities worked very hard in this area. However, but that is not all there is to access. It cannot be the case that there are students who, because of their background, cannot fully engage with their education. We can be as innovative as we want but if students cannot engage with the education we are providing, that is very much a problem. They will not get the grades they should get and grades matter for earnings. They are one of the main returns that students seek. They are not the only thing they look at when they go to university but an important aspect of it. If their financial position is causing a systematic downgrading of their achievements, we should be very concerned about it. This issue could be rectified very quickly. Most students do not want to be working and know they should not be working so much but the financial pressures at home dictate that they have to do so. It is either work or give up education altogether. I know there is a review of the SUSI grant under way and I hope it will be part of a serious effort to address the big shortfall in the cost of attending higher education for students because it is a big and growing issue.