Just six from my working class school went to UCC. College is STILL all about elites and privilege

T he annual pre-Christ-as bout of middle-class angst that is the Feeder Schools list for universities was pub-lished this week, to the usual pained and impas-sioned growls from politicians that something must be done.

From time immemorial it has been the same story in the Irish State. Those students who go to private schools go on to univer-sity and, with the exception of a small few, those who go to schools in the most disadvan-taged areas of the State don't.

The headlines on Tuesday's papers had a common refrain: the privately educated elite have greater access to third-level education. There is just no getting away from the fact that there is a gaping socio-economic inequality in progression rates to our universities. It was ever thus.

I went to Sullivan's Quay pri-mary school in Cork city in the 1970s. When it closed down in 2006, a victim of suburban sprawl and the hollowing out of the inner city, the school hosted an exhibit of its history with all-comers welcome to browse the old photographs of school teams, the creaky classrooms and the antiquated plumbing. Of most interest to me was the log book of pupils and their parents.

While naturally gravitating to my own record and that of my old friends, my eyes kept being drawn to the parents' occupa-tions. Sullivan's Quay educated the boys of the inner city work-ing classes: the places were Fords, Dunlops, Irish Steel, Cork Corporation.

The occupations were mechanics, breadmen, milkmen, factory work-ers, painters (my own late father's occupa-tion), plumbers, car-penters, manual labourers, electricians. There were no barristers, no solici-tors, no doctors, no accountants, no journalists, no teachers, cer-tainly no university professors.

In the early 1980s, most of my class continued to the local feeder secondary school. A few disappeared. We knew not where. The secondary educa-tion was much like the primary. The classes big. The discipline tough. This was still the age of corporal punishment.

We were still good at hurling but couldn't win the elusive Harty Cup. The teaching seemed fine but we weren't used to anything else. Career guidance was well meaning but relatively perfunctory, and cer-tainly not aimed at attending university, although every year we sent a few to UCC and a few more to the then Cork Regional Technical College. Lots of boys went to the State's training agency, AnCO. Some emigrated and some went on the dole.

Some teachers went through the motions. It wasn't quite Dead Poet's Society but some clearly had vision and encour- aged many of us to think of UCC which, although it was only a stone's throw away, might as well have been another world

Most of my classmates were really smart and certainly as clever as the privately educated people I met when I was one of the handful from my school to go to university in the mid-1980s.

Our school was ten minutes' walk from UCC. Ten minutes' walk the other side was a fee-paying boys' school. That year, that school sent all their Leav-ing Cert class to university. Our school sent six of us to UCC. Thirty years later, the fee-paying school is ranked number one in Cork, and sent 120% of its students to university, according to the odd methodol-ogy used to calculate these figures.

My old school sent two students to UCC.

Given the numbers today look much the same as they did 30 year ago, and the State's aim is to improve access to education for disad-vantaged students and schools in areas of economic depriva-tion, then why has it failed and what is the solution?

This question is even more apposite considering that fees for third level were abolished by the Fine Gael, Labour, Dem-ocratic Left government in 1995.

The great wheeze about free fees was that it would greatly increase access to universities. This was that government's big idea and, once enacted, that was the end of the matter. The reality is that free fees is one of the greatest frauds ever foisted on the Irish people. It created the perception of a meritocracy, but the reality is that money rules.

All one has to do is look at the feeder tables. If we accept that universities are vital for future success, then surely we are tol-erating an educational apart-heid when the majority of third-level students come from a certain social strata.

Diversity in universities is not just good for our third-level institutions but for society itself. With so many of our civil service, for example, being mined from the same social strata, this only creates silos of thinking and it stunts innova-tion. Groupthink was blamed for the economic crash. We know where it comes from.

As it stands, counteracting social disadvantage in third-level education resides with the universities, not the State which has abrogated itself from this responsibility.

Over the past 20 years since free fees were abolished, the universities have made varying efforts to diversify the social make-up of their student bod-ies, and increase the numbers of students from socially disad-vantaged areas who never dreamed of going to university. We call them Access students, but the reality is that once they are in class they're just the same as any other students and do just as well.

My own university, DCU, has long led the way in providing such access. We currently have 1,300 students from socially disadvantaged areas. This is over 20% of the entire access community in the State.

We took in 360 first-year access students in September. Back in 1995 the numbers were negligible.

The truth is that we have only been able to support these stu-dents through financial aid from the university's educa-tional trust. And there is a result. Over 97% of these access students graduate with a second-class honours degree or higher.

The overall story is that he suite of pre-entry and post-entry supports that universities use, including financial aid, results in very positive outcomes that breaks the cycle of disadvantage that weighs on thousands of families all over the country, none of whom could ever dream of sending their children to private schools.

But it is the State that needs to do so much more in providing equality of opportunity and expectation for children who might be the first in their fami-lies to have the opportunity to go to third level, and not simply leave it to the universities them-selves.

The great fear remains that it is the exceptional students in disadvantaged schools who are picking up bursaries, but not the ones whose talents are untapped and become lost.

There needs to be a Depart-ment of Education task force established to entice poorly rep-resented schools to get students, and their parents and guardi-ans, to consider going to univer-sity. Otherwise the headlines will remain the same.