Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Germany, Iceland, France, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia and the Czech Republic have no student contribution fees. Spain, a country that was hammered by austerity, has an annual student contribution fee of €500 yet we are charging €3,000. Now we are going to be charging that for a hugely diminished third level experience for the class of 2020. Any additional funding is welcome but the key metric is funding per student. Under various Fine Gael Governments, that has dropped by 43%. The numbers in higher education are going up. They have doubled since 2000 and another 40,000 additional students in higher education are projected over the next decade. The actual funding per student has crashed. If the Minister wants to know why there is a mental health difficulty, at least part of the answer is the enormous pressure and stress, financial and otherwise, put on students because of the chronic underfunding of higher education.

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