Buying your way into college? Private tuition and the transition to higher education in Ireland

Smyth, Emer

doi:10.1080/03054980801981426

Cited by 109 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…It could, for that matter, be due to differences in primary schooling. Students from higher SES backgrounds make greater use of private tuition in preparing for the Leaving Certificate but, paradoxically, it appears to have no beneficial effect, see Smyth (2009).…”

Section: Conclusion and Implications For Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of abolishing university tuition costs: evidence from Ireland

Denny

2011

Working Paper Series

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University tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in Ireland in 1996. This paper examines the effect of this reform on the socio-economic gradient to determine whether the reform was successful in achieving its objective of promoting educational equality that is improving the chances of low socioeconomic status(SES) students progressing to university. It finds that the reform clearly did not have that effect. It is also shown that the university/SES gradient can be explained by differential performance at second level. Students from white collar backgrounds do significantly better in their final second level exams than the children of blue-collar workers. The results are very similar to recent findings for the UK. The results show that the effect of SES on school performance is generally stronger for those at the lower end of the conditional distribution of academic attainment. 1.IntroductionThe transition from secondary to higher education is an important milestone for an individual and one that generally brings substantial financial and other benefits. Understanding the barriers to making this transition is therefore important and has been widely studied by economists and others. The potential rôle of tuition costs is important because it is an instrument that governments can seek to manipulate. This paper is concerned with one large reform to tuition costs in an economy, Ireland, where there has been a longstanding concern that people from a low socio-economic status (SES) background are heavily under-represented in higher education in general and universities in particular. This has been well established in several official reports for example Clancy (1988Clancy ( , 2001) and most recently O'Connell et al (2006). This generates a high inter-generational correlation in educational attainment and clearly constrains social mobility. Leaving aside concerns about equity, it also implies an efficiency loss to the economy. The educational immobility between generations in Ireland is high relative to many other countries: in a crosscountry study of inter-generational educational mobility using data on OECD countriesChevalier et al (2009) find that the association between education levels of individuals and their parents was highest in Ireland 1 . While the scale of the problem is well known, there is a lack of research which establishes why low SES groups do not progress to higher education.There are some qualitative studies on the subject as well as numerous policy evaluations and reviews 2 . However these cannot (nor do they claim to) establish what the causal mechanisms behind educational disadvantage are, still less to quantify them. Hence they are of limited assistance in the design of policy.That said, the government operates several programs to deal with educational disadvantage in schools under the heading "Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools" (DEIS). These 1 Using a different methodology and different data, Asplund et al. (2008) also find that for a subset of OECD countries the associat...

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Section: Conclusion and Implications For Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of abolishing university tuition costs: evidence from Ireland

Denny

2011

Working Paper Series

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“…Others are broadly focused in the education sector and contain questions about private tutoring alongside questions about other matters. International examples include the TIMSS and SACMEQ surveys noted above, and national examples include data collected by the Turkish Higher Education Council (Gurun and Millimet 2008) and the School Leavers' Surveys administered in Ireland (Smyth 2009). Data on tutoring may also be collected from wider enquiries such as the Egyptian Labor Market Survey (Elbadawy et al 2006) and the Vietnam Living Standards Measurement Survey (Dang 2007).…”

Section: Instruments For Collecting Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Researching shadow education: methodological challenges and directions

Bray

2010

Asia Pacific Educ. Rev.

129

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Research on shadow education has considerably increased in volume and has helped to improve understanding of the scale, nature, and implications of the phenomenon. However, the field is still in its infancy. Literature on shadow education reflects confusion over terms and parameters, and data suffer from challenges in securing evidence from actors who may be unwilling or unable to respond to enquiries in a clear manner. Particular care is needed in cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons. Nevertheless, the trajectory of improvement in both conceptualisation and instrumentation gives ground for confidence that shadow education will be progressively better documented and better understood.

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“…The same patterns were confirmed in a number of other educational and social contexts, e.g. in Korea (Yi, 2002), Greece (Verdis, 2002), Hong Kong (Kwok 2004), Germany (Schneider 2004), Ireland (Smyth 2009), Poland (Putkiewicz 2005), England , etc. Using the OECD's PISA data, Southgate (2009) demonstrated that the effect of socioeconomic status on shadow education varies between countries.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Emerging from the shadow: a comparative qualitative exploration of private tutoring in Eurasia

Liu

2014

Asia Pacific Journal of Education

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Buying your way into college? Private tuition and the transition to higher education in Ireland

Cited by 109 publications

References 27 publications

The effect of abolishing university tuition costs: evidence from Ireland

The effect of abolishing university tuition costs: evidence from Ireland

Researching shadow education: methodological challenges and directions

Emerging from the shadow: a comparative qualitative exploration of private tutoring in Eurasia

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