Dr. Niall Kennedy:

I am sympathetic to some of the points made by Dr. Smyth, for example. What concerns me is the framing of this politically to suggest the benefits of higher education only accrue to individual students and they should pay. The problem with that is you lose sight of the benefit to society - the €9 gain for every euro spent, as somebody else said. For example, in little more than a decade England went from a situation where the maximum fee was £1,000 to one where the fee in 2010 was more than £9,000 for everybody, with no differentiation according on parental income. That is what I would be worried about if we had a political framing of this as being something the student should pay for because he or she gets all the benefits. We all get the benefits.