Universities appear likely to use a draw or lottery system to offer places for high points courses on Wednesday, a consequence of a surge in exceptional grades linked to this year’s Leaving Cert outcomes. The clustering of students obtaining high grades has made it challenging to distinguish between aspirants seeking admission in revered programmes like medicine, dentistry, veterinary science, business, management, engineering, and others, as per sources in higher education.
The Leaving Cert scores for this year have been purposely boosted to make them compatible with recent previous years’ outcomes, thus ensuring that students aren’t disadvantaged when competing for university seats against past year examinees. Nonetheless, it is anticipated that approximately 60% of CAO applicants will secure their first preferred university place this year, and up to 85% are likely to clinch a spot in one of their top-three preferred institutions.
There are marginally fewer CAO applicants this year, totalling just over 83,500, a mild dip from last year, with most of them having to wait until Wednesday, 2pm to learn if they’ve secured a university placement. The CAO points required typically mirror the number of available university slots, and the grades obtained by students for specific courses.
An increased number of applications have been witnessed this year for physiotherapy, dentistry, and pharmacy courses, as revealed by the recent CAO data. Despite this, health, business, and arts programmes remain the leading choices for tertiary level applicants, based on “change of mind” data that records students’ programme preferences until the July 1st cut-off.
Over half the applicants revised their course options during the May-June window. In totality, health programmes have the highest demand (71,652 applications), trailed by business and administration courses (69,729), arts (51,624), social and behavioural sciences (36,777), and lastly, engineering and engineering trades (30,213) for Level 8 or honours degree courses.
The largest yearly increase in application numbers has been noticed in physiotherapy (+22%), followed by dentistry (including dental nursing and hygiene (+10%), pharmacy (including pharmacy technician (+9%) and primary education (+8%).
Transport services experienced the most significant annual decline, with a decrease of 38 per cent. There was a 16 per cent drop in hygiene and occupational health services, while agriculture fell by 12 per cent compared to the previous year. Additionally, there was a reduction of 10 per cent in language services, personal services, and secondary education courses when compared to the previous year’s figures.