The employers’ group Ibec has expressed alarm about the large number of unfilled places on university engineering courses.
As the CAO released the second round offers last night, Dublin City University – one of the State’s leading high-tech universities – was still struggling to fill places on its main engineering courses.
Despite having offered places to all candidates with minimum entry requirements, the courses at DCU remain unfilled.
Brendan Butler, director of enterprise with Ibec, yesterday called on the Government to respond to the needs of the manufacturing sector.
"We would be concerned about students not applying for these courses," he said. "We would support any efforts which would assist DCU in upping the numbers . . . Students are very clearly analysing what they see as the sectors offering the best opportunities." Despite an increasing Government emphasis on the importance of producing highly-skilled graduates in the engineering and science sectors, the CAO website lists vacant places on nine engineering courses at DCU.
This means students only have to meet the basic entry requirements, including at least a C grade in higher-level maths, to be allocated a place. Consequently, students with a relatively weak Leaving Cert could now gain entry to these courses. Students have not taken up places on DCU courses in a number of areas, including electronic engineering, mechanical and manufacturing engineering, mechatronics, manufacturing engineering with business studies, and information and communications engineering.
In a trend described by Ibec as "really worrying for the future of Irish manufacturing", several industrial manufacturing, electronic and computer engineering courses at other universities, such as NUI Maynooth (four), NUI Galway (two), UCD (one) and UCC (one), also have unfilled places.
By comparison, general and civil engineering courses at UCD, UCC and Trinity College Dublin have no vacant places. This indicates that many Leaving Certificate students are shying away from certain areas of engineering as a career, and may be worried about choosing courses in these areas because of recent job losses in the manufacturing sector.
In a further blow to Government plans to promote a skills-based society, several IT and computer science-related courses in universities such as TCD, NUI Galway and Cork Institute of Technology also have vacancies this year. DCU said the fact that it offered a greater range of specialised courses may partly explain why it had a high number of courses with places unfilled.
However, its dean of engineering and computing yesterday acknowledged that some of its engineering courses may need to be reviewed to see how better they could meet the demands of industry and the economy. Prof Charles McCorkell said the decline in interest in its engineering courses marked the continuation of a trend whereby many students were favouring other courses, such as civil and construction engineering. He was not in a position to say how many vacant places DCU had on its engineering courses.
However, he expressed confidence that the downturn in applications for its courses would be addressed in the coming years. This would be achieved partly through consultation with State bodies such as the Higher Education Authority.
Labour Senator Joanna Tuffy, who first highlighted the problem, has urged colleges to allocate vacant places to part-time students.