‘Grants no longer enough to help students’: College dropout rate rising

Student grants may no longer be enough to help keep financially strained young people in college, according to the Higher Education Authority.

Its latest analysis of dropout rates shows that more than one in six students who began college in 2010 were no longer at the same institution by the second year of their course, a slightly higher proportion than three years earlier, as reported in the Irish Examiner yesterday.

It also reveals increasing numbers of third-level students are receiving a state grant, up from 32% who started college in 2007 to 37% in 2010. But instead of supporting them to stay in college, the proportion of institute of technology students with a grant who drop out is shown to be higher than that of non-recipients, a reversal of the situation three years previous.