Students who deferred third-level entry to this year feel like the 'trade-off'

Ronan Cloney, from Wexford, who is worried about what this year's grade inflation, particularly with higher grades, will mean for CAO points come Friday. 

Students who opted to defer their entry to higher-level education until this year feel like the "trade-off" in this year's Leaving Cert. 

That's according to 20-year-old student Ronan Cloney, from Wexford, who is worried about what this year's grade inflation, particularly with higher grades, will mean for CAO points come Friday. 

Record results this year under calculated grades mean that entry points are expected to increase, the extent of which is not yet clear. 

Mr Cloney, who sat his Leaving Cert last year, told the Irish Examiner that he has been trying to ensure fairness for deferred CAO applicants since May, when the exams were first cancelled. 

“It’s hard to even quantify what impact that will have come Friday, I don't think anyone even knows what to expect," he said. 

"There are people who filled out their CAO form knowing they had 500 points, for example, and their last choice is 470, for example. In a normal year, you’d be thinking it won’t jump by that much. 

There are people on Friday who potentially won’t get an offer with those points.

"When the CAO was closing, we were told ‘don’t worry, there’s standardisation and you won’t see inflation’. If we had known what we were facing into and had there been some transparency, I’m fairly sure a lot of our CAO applications would see lower point courses so that we’d know we would get in somewhere.”

In recent weeks, Mr Cloney has made contact with many other people applying to this year's CAO process with Leaving Cert results from a previous year. There is a perception that people who deferred their entry to the CAO process are spoilt students who took a year off to “find themselves”, he added.

“That’s not the case,” he said. “There are people who had siblings in higher education, so they couldn’t afford to go last year. They had to work instead, to save money. There’s people who suffered bereavements and weren’t in a position to go to college for personal reasons.”

"Some of the responses we're getting are ‘well, its too late now lads.’ But I've been emailing people about this since May, the minister for education herself raised this issue in late May with the previous minister." 

"We're kind of being viewed as the trade-off, like 'Hard luck to reapplicants, sure you should have known what you were going in to'." 

Looking at adding extra places after Friday will cause its own set of logistical problems with accommodation, he added. "If they do decide to do something for us by the time round two comes, we’re still up in the air. We don’t deserve to be an afterthought." 

A spokesman for Simon Harris, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, said the department and the Higher Education Authority (HEA) are continuing to work with the third-level sector and the CAO on these matters.

"The minister knows this is an incredibly anxious time for students but he also wants students to examine all options available to them, including further or higher education and the earn-and-learn model of apprenticeship."