Batt O'Keefe, the education minister, is planning a formal system of private donations to third-level colleges in the hope of amassing millions of euros in endowment funds for Irish universities. But he has made clear that students who can afford it will have to pay towards the cost of their college education in future.
O’Keeffe has asked a group reviewing the structure and funding of the third-level sector to explore the potential of philanthropic donation to third-level education.
“I have to ask the question: ‘How many more Chuck Feeneys are out there that we haven’t sourced yet?’,” said the minister, in a reference to the Irish-American benefactor whose donation of millions of dollars to Irish education gave a huge boost to the likes of the University of Limerick and Dublin City University. “There is so much goodwill to Ireland, so many people who have ties and relationships with Ireland that if we make it amenable to them, I think they would be willing to become involved.”
The minister reiterated his determination to make well-off students pay for their college education, and intends to bring proposals to cabinet in April. He plans to increase the revenue streams to universities and institutes of education as a way of improving access to third level for lower socioeconomic groups.
“I am not satisfied that the free fees [regime] has made any difference to disadvantaged areas,” he said. “We want to increase our participation rates from the current 55% [of school-leavers] to 70% by 2016, and that is going to have implications for resourcing third level into the future. I want to look at what student commitment should be put in place and make recommendations to government in April.
“It certainly could bring revenue into the third-level sector itself but more especially it could allow me to start targeting access programmes to look at how little progress we have made in terms of [students from disadvantaged backgrounds].”
Department of Education officials are studying international models of student contribution to the cost of third-level education. O’Keeffe said the government had put 33% more funding into third-level education in the last four years, increasing spending on the sector to €2 billion. But third-level institutions were still telling him that they had insufficient funding.
The most recent figures available to him indicate that 100% of the children of “higher professionals” study at third level as do 89% of farmers’ children. But just 27% of manual workers’ offspring go to university or an institute of education.
O’Keeffe will this week meet Colin Hunt, an economist, whom he has appointed chairman of the Higher Education Strategy Group. The minister will ask Hunt’s group to examine the potential of philanthropy in education, and to make recommendations on a system for Ireland when it reports back later this year. The group is to make proposals on third-level funding and structures for the next 20 years.
Philanthropic donations to third level have been encouraged in many countries but nowhere more successfully than in America where endowment funds are a core element of university financing. Ivy-League colleges such as Harvard University in Boston, Yale in Connecticut and Stanford in California boast endowment funds of €36 billion, €23 billion and €17 billion respectively.
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