Almost 4,000 mature students receive CAO offers

Thousands of mature students are set to receive Central Applications Office offers for third-level courses on Thursday.

Places on third-level courses will also be offered to those completing further education courses, graduate entry medicine applicants, access students as well as those who have deferred places.

The CAO is due to issue a total of almost 5,000 course offers to 3,909 applicants which will be available to view online from 6am.

Successful applicants will also receive a paper offer notice by post, email and a text message (if they have selected this option) with details of their offer.

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The CAO's communications officer Eileen Keleghan urged all mature, deferred and other applicants to log in to their CAO accounts on Thursday to check if they have received a "round zero" offer.

“Offers must be accepted by 5.15pm on Thursday next, August 9th. Failure to accept an offer by the reply date will result in the offer being cancelled,” she said.

The majority of CAO applicants – including those who sat this year’s Leaving Cert – are set to receive their offers on Monday, August 20th.

These so-called round one offers will be available to view online from 6am on that date.

Successful applicants will also receive offer notification by email and text message, as well as by post. The reply date for round-one offers is August 24th at 5.15pm.

The CAO had a total of 77,171 applications for third-level places in 2018, compared with 80,568 in 2017, a fall of 4.2 per cent.

The fall in applications recorded this year is likely to result in lower points requirements in some courses, when the CAO releases each institution’s first-round offers in August.

The greatest fall in applications to Stem-related courses were the physical sciences, which fell 33 per cent. Mathematics and statistics fell 12 per cent while, perhaps more significantly, the number of school-leavers opting for ICT as their first choice fell 11 per cent.