Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 3 March 2021
643. Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science the number of offers for places in third-level institutions given to students who sat the leaving certificate exams in November 2020 and received improved results; and the courses or subject areas in which these offers were given, that is, medicine, engineering, law, dentistry, arts and so on in tabular form. [11946/21]
View answerUniversities and Institutes of Technology are autonomous and determine their own procedures for admission. The CAO process applications for undergraduate, and some postgraduate, courses on their behalf.
Decisions on admissions are made by the higher education institutions who then instruct the CAO to make offers to successful candidates. Therefore neither I nor my Department have a function in relation to such matters and information on offer figures is held by the CAO, not by my Department.
According to figures released by the CAO a total of 632 offers were identified as a result of the 2020 Leaving Certificate Written Examination. 595 of these were offers for level 8 courses, and 37 were offers for level 7/6 offers. My Department does not hold data on how many of these offers were accepted, or what courses or subject areas these offers were in.
