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

Abstract

A number of countries, including Ireland, have experienced a recent growth in the prevalence of ‘shadow education’, that is, paid private tuition outside the schooling system. Previous international studies have indicated that such tuition can enhance academic performance and facilitate access to tertiary education. However, such studies have rarely taken account of important differences between those taking private tuition and other students. This paper explores the characteristics of students taking private tuition and the impact of such tuition on academic outcomes in the Republic of Ireland. Participation in private tuition is disproportionately concentrated among students from middle‐class families, those with higher prior performance and those with greater engagement in the schooling process. When the selective nature of the group taking private tuition is accounted for, private tuition yields no advantages in terms of upper secondary examination performance. It is argued that, rather than representing a rational strategy for the middle classes to secure educational advantage, participation in private tuition must be seen in the context of the competitive examination system in operation.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Selina McCoy and Dorothy Watson for access to the School Leavers’ Survey data, the collection of which was funded by the Department of Education and Science. I am also grateful to Kathleen Lynch, Philip O’Connell, Delma Byrne, Merike Darmody, Selina McCoy and participants at an ESRI seminar for comments on an earlier draft of the paper. The analyses and interpretations are the responsibility of the author.

Notes

1. In the Irish context, the term ‘second‐level’ is generally used to relate to schools catering for 12–18 year‐olds as the term ‘secondary’ is sometimes taken to refer to a particular school sector (voluntary secondary schools). However, throughout this article, the term ‘secondary’ is used to refer to all second‐level schools, in keeping with the practice in other European countries.

2. These ‘secondary effects’ (Boudon, 1974), that is, differences in the behaviour of social classes with the same levels of ability, are seen as operating over and above ‘primary effects’, that is, differences in prior ability/performance. Explanations of differences in ability are generally bracketed off in rational choice theory, although Erikson et al. (2005) themselves estimate that primary effects are roughly three times as large as secondary effects (a point earlier made by Nash, 2003; see also Nash, 2006).

3. Cultural capital is here taken in the sense of providing the skills and knowledge for examination success rather than involvement in a broad range of high culture activities.

4. While those attending private schools do pay fees, they do not cover the full economic costs of their education since the salaries of teachers in fee‐paying schools are paid by the State.

5. In order to explore whether patterns of take‐up differed between urban and rural areas, separate analyses were conducted for urban school‐leavers (analyses not shown here). The patterns were very similar to those for the sample as a whole in terms of gender, social class and school type influences.

6. Designated disadvantaged schools receive additional funding from the State.

7. These analyses exclude the small number of students who took the Leaving Certificate Applied programme since the assessment system is quite different for this group.

8. The measure of teacher expectations was based on a score of 1 (lower secondary) to 4 (degree level), and averaged across all students within the school.

9. Comparing the baseline and background models in Table 3 indicates that the grinds coefficient reduces by 0.396, which is just over a third of its original value.

10. Information on time spent on homework is quite specific to school‐related homework and study, and is therefore highly unlikely to involve any overlap with time spent on private tuition.