CAO 2023: Applications up for engineering, law and architecture, while numbers dip for medicine and health

The number of college applications for courses where there is strong job growth – such as architecture, construction, business and engineering – have increased this year.

By contrast, the number of applications for nursing and medicine courses has declined as Covid-era interest in health-related courses continues to wane.

The figures are contained in the CAO’s “change of mind” data, which captures students’ course choices as of the July 1st deadline.

Most Leaving Cert students are due to receive their college offers in round one of the CAO offers on August 30th.

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The extent to which CAO entry points will rise or fall for individual courses will depend on the supply and demand for places across individual courses and the grades achieved by college applicants.

Following a number of years of grade inflation, Leaving Cert results on aggregate are likely to fall slightly this year as part of what officials describe as a “glide path” towards more normal patterns of results.

In all, more than 83,000 applications have been received by Central Applications Office (CAO), an almost identical figure to last year.

More than half of applicants amended their course listings in the May-June period.

Applications from the North (-15 per cent) have continued to slide, while applications are up from outside the EU (+18 per cent).

Overall, when broken down by course type, business and administration courses are the single most popular area (67,000 applications) followed by arts (55,000), social and behavioural science (37,000) and engineering (30,000) for level eight or honours degree courses.

Year on year differences show increases and decreases across different programme areas for these level eight courses.

Biggest decreases

Among the biggest year-on-year decreases were in environment (-19 per cent) and veterinary medicine (-18 per cent), an area that has commanded very high entry points in recent years.

Health

Medicine (-9 per cent), nursing (-9 per cent) and health (-6 per cent) are among the categories that are down this year. Pharmacy (+12 per cent), dentistry (+4 per cent) and physiotherapy (+2 per cent) bucked the negative health trend, however.

Other areas where applications were down include manufacturing and processing courses (-7 per cent), welfare and social sciences (both -4 per cent).

Education

It was a mixed bag for education with applications down for primary education (-5 per cent), a sector where pupil numbers are declining for demographic reasons, and up for secondary education (+14 per cent), where student numbers are growing thanks to a demographic bulge.

Biggest increases

Some of the biggest growth in application numbers were in agriculture (+16 per cent), hygiene and occupational health (+ 14 per cent) and physical science (+8 per cent).

Architecture and construction (+6 per cent), law, engineering (both +5 per cent) and business (+3 per cent) also recorded increases in application numbers.

Despite concern over the future of the arts in the UK, application numbers are increasing in Ireland in both art, design and media (+4 per cent) and arts (+ 3 per cent).

There are also signs that college applicants appear to be applying to newly created technological universities in greater numbers than ever before, according to informed sources.