College fees
Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the president of DCU, has written a few blog posts about ways to cope with the way the government has been slashing the funding for universities (usually on the quiet), but with the recent announcement of the proposed new college loans plan, he’s written more, and most recently this post discussing the levels of the fees for different courses, which he disagrees with, mainly because the universities haven’t been asked to the policy table from what I can see:
In the end, this is another aspect of any new framework for student contributions that confirms the importance of full consultation with the higher education institutions before any final model is put in place.
The engagement with the idea to the stage where its details are being debated is sufficiently depressing that I wrote a reply to his post, and I wanted to reproduce it here:
… Read the restI still find it enormously depressing to see the reintroduction of fees embraced in this manner, especially by university heads, despite their being a suboptimal solution to a blatantly manufactured problem.