Students receiving the results of their Leaving Certificate today will probably jump to an instant assumption of their success or failure based on their perception of whether they have secured sufficient CAO points to secure one of their nominated course choices.
There is a widely-held belief that CAO points are determined by colleges in advance and that they remain relatively constant over the years.
This of course is not the case, as CAO points requirements are determined by the number of places on offer in a given course and the points obtained by students seeking places on the specific programme.
Will acceptances return to pre-pandemic levels this year?
Although colleges and the Government are hoping that third-level colleges can operate as closely as possible to pre-Covid 19 modes of operation, there is still a level of uncertainty about the impact the virus will have on third-level life.
The high levels of vaccination among young people is a good omen for the coming academic year but hoping that the presence of several hundred students attending lectures in enclosed lecture theatres will not lead to increased infections even among the double vaccinated, is still a work in progress.
Will there be an increase in applications to defer entry?
Probably not, as the alternate options of working for a year presents the same health challenges as proceeding with your third-level education.
Will we see the return of the high fee-paying international students?
The role of the international student numbers, although not large overall at undergraduate level, is highly significant in a number of disciplines, medicine being the most important.
How many places will be taken up by non-EU international applicants is still unclear. The international student market has been transformed by changes of attitude in many traditional markets for our universities, ITs, and particularly private colleges.
If colleges can encourage them to accept places this year, and generate substantial additional fee income that was lost due to Covid-19, they will do everything they can to accommodate them. Their presence in Ireland in this academic year could affect CAO points requirement in some courses.
Apart from the results of the Leaving Cert released by the State Exams Commission today, other factors will determine how many places on each course are still available in this round of the CAO competitive process. Many places on the programmes sought by 2021 Leaving Cert students have already been allocated.
The CAO has offered places and received acceptances in recent weeks from more than 8,000 of a subset of this year’s overall CAO applicants.
These include adult applicants aged over 23 who are offered places in round A in early July as well as those who sought and were granted a deferred a place in 2020 and reapplied for it again this year.
The subset also includes candidates who secured a higher course choice offer from their 2020 CAO course list after receiving a higher grade written Leaving Cert exams they sat in last November/December 2020.
In round zero in early August several thousand other CAO applicants secured places on the basis of a QQI award through a FE/PLC programme taken during the past academic year.
HEAR and DARE programmes
Some students will get an offer of a college place on points that will be lower than those which will be published by the CAO on first-round offer day.
This is because the CAO has been instructed to offer a place by a specific college based on a successful Disability Access Route to Education (Dare) or Higher Education Access Route (Hear) application, or on the basis of a scholarship programme.
The first-round CAO offer process
For all other applicants, their success or otherwise in getting an offer on a specific course will be decided when the admission officers representing all the colleges instruct the CAO offices in Galway how to proceed in relation to each specific course code.
They will know exactly how many places on each course are already spoken for through the processes above, and how many more can be offered to the remaining applicants.
Once the CAO knows the number of places for every course on offer, it enters that data into its computer system to determine what offers will be made to students online.
Until then, neither CAO officials nor college admissions officers know what points will be required to secure the last available place on offer in this round.
Tables of the points scores of the last person to secure an offer of a place through the mainstream application process, excluding all of the exceptions outlined above on each course this year, will be published in The Irish Times in the CAO First Round Offers education supplement next week.
If there are more applicants with the same points than there are remaining places on offer, the CAO computer will generate a random number for each applicant; those holding the highest numbers numerically will be offered the available places. When this occurs, an asterisk (*) appears beside the printed points score in the published charts.
The new unknown
Apart from applicants from within the State also being offered places are those with awards other than the Leaving Cert. They will be mainly school-leavers who have taken Northern Ireland or UK-based A-levels, and others from an increased number of applicants who have completed end-of-school exams in other EU countries. It remains to be seen how many of these will secure a place in an Irish third-level institution.
The coming weeks will reveal if Ireland is about to experience a large inflow of continental students who would have traditionally sought places in the UK but who are now attracted to Ireland as the only English-speaking university option within the European Union other than tiny Malta.
