Professor John Hegarty:

I will start with the questions on the reasons for the dropout rate and the reasons that more of our young people are not opting for the apprenticeship route.

There is a major issue at the transition from second to third level as to the suitability of everybody for higher education as distinct from further education or apprenticeships. Among parents, there is a snob value in a sense that universities and higher education are better and that is the place to go even if the student is totally unsuited and would be better off elsewhere. The league tables of the secondary schools which send pupils to universities copper-fastens this hierarchical view of education. That is most pernicious. There is a move in the higher education system, especially in the institutes of technology to offer courses from levels 6 and 7 to level 8, and that is indicative of the pathway from level 6 all the way to level 10. The respect for levels 6 and 7 qualifications are not as high as it was. This is a complicated matter which is a societal cultural issue. The solution will be when graduates realise they came through the wrong route and will become the ambassadors for alternatives. That is happening a little in the United States. Many graduates who have paid significant fees to highly respected institutions find that it has not offered them the significant rewards in terms of employment and so on. They are now expressing this. There are students who are highly qualified who opt to go for a different route. That speaks for itself. We need to have that message articulated in some way.

The other issue is about who pays for higher education, is it the State or a student loan system. We are advocating that it should be shared by all, partly on the basis that anything else is totally unrealistic. I was Provost of Trinity College for ten years from 2001 to 2011, when we went from boom to bust and at no time during the boom period could the State bring the Irish higher education system up to the OECD average. Why would we expect the State in the future to deliver that? It is a major political issue. If we want a high quality system, the investment must come in a different way, hence the diversity of sources.

We were careful not to mention the term "loan" because it has a psychological impact. The first impression is that the person will be saddled with major debt and he or she will have to pay it back no matter what, or otherwise his or her possessions will be repossessed. It is important to state that what is envisaged is not a mortgage and is not similar to how the system operates in the UK or US. We must ensure that people know that we are not thinking of that scale of student contribution. That would be abhorrent for Irish people. The State will be a major contributor to Irish higher education; it has to be because there is a significant public good associated with it.

There is an issue about whether a contribution will scare away certain elements of our society, the disadvantaged where perhaps there is no culture of going on to higher education and risk aversion to loans. Will there be a risk aversion to this type of mechanism, which is not a mortgage and that if one does not make much money one never pays back. That is also a culture and psychological issue. In designing any system like this all those factors have to be taken into account. There will still be a huge onus on the higher education institutions to be proactive in recruiting from all of those traditionally under represented groups, whether it is economically disadvantaged students, students with disability, mature students or part-time students. As I understand it, the income contingent loans system has not turned off students from economic disadvantage in participating. In the UK, it has a detrimental effect on mature and part-time students. We must learn from that.

There must be checks and balances. There is a lot of work to be done. Let us focus on Brexit and the other major political upheavals across the world. I am convinced that our major attraction internationally will no longer be tax. While it will still be important, it will be the talent of our people and that means access by everybody to a good education, not to an average or poor education. If we do not have both of those we will not be able to compete as a country.