Lack of applicants for 10% of courses

More than one in 10 college courses did not have enough applicants to fill all their places in this week’s first round of CAO offers.

More than 50 honours (level 8) degrees and more than 100 ordinary degree and higher certificate (levels 7 and 6) courses opened for fresh applications on the CAO website yesterday.

Almost 50,000 people were offered places on Monday morning and over 22,000 were made online the same day.

Although increased demand pushed up points on many business degrees this year, business programmes were significant among courses with high volumes of unaccepted offers or that did not have enough applications to fill up the courses. There are also many courses in the marketing and public relations fields with vacant places.

More than a third of level 7/6 courses that remain unfilled are at two private colleges — Dublin Business School and Griffith College — but most of the rest are in institutes of technology, including more than 20 in Letterkenny and a dozen at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology.

The only university degrees to reopen for applications are at NUI Maynooth, which has four with an electronic engineering component that did not have enough suitably qualified applicants.

The places opened up as calls continued to arrive to guidance counsellors operating the National Parents’ Council-Post Primary helpline (1800 265165).

“A lot of people are disappointed not to have the points for the course they most wanted, and they are looking for advice on their options,” said Institute of Guidance Counsellors president Gerry Flynn.

“Some students are upset because they misunderstood the way the system works, so it’s worth reminding people for next year to follow the simple rule to list courses in their order of preference.”

In some cases, students list courses based on how they expect to do in the Leaving Certificate or what points were needed for courses the previous year. However, CAO will always offer students the course highest on their list that they are eligible for, even if another course further down their list has higher entry points.

Mr Flynn said that, contrary to a report in the Choices for College supplement in Monday’s Irish Examiner, results from this year’s Leaving Certificate cannot be combined for CAO points if students decide to repeat the exams next year.

While repeat Leaving Certificate students can satisfy the requirement for university entry — in addition to minimum points — to pass maths or English, using a previous year’s results, the CAO will only count results from one year’s Leaving Certificate when calculating points.

The closing date to accept CAO first-round offers is next Monday evening, and a second round of offers will issue tomorrow week, Aug 29.

Meanwhile, close to half of 352 parents with children below third-level ages who were surveyed for Standard Life said they have no savings in place to fund their college education.

However, an equal number — 43% — said they had a regular savings plan, and more than one in 10 have a lump sum or inheritance set aside to put their children through college.