University challenge: Non-fee schools match fee-paying ones

NON FEE-PAYING schools provide equally high numbers of undergraduates to two of the country’s leading universities as fee-paying ones, figures show.

While the feeder schools providing most students to Dublin’s third-level colleges are largely fee-paying, the ‘free education’ sector performs just as well as the fee-paying one for admission to University College Cork (UCC) and University of Limerick (UL).

In the list of schools whose students gained places at UCC and UL last autumn, published in today’s Irish Examiner (print edition), a mix of fee-paying and free schools are in the top 10.