Changes made this year for Northern Ireland students wanting to go to colleges and universities in the Republic should increase the numbers who qualify for places, the Minister for Further and Higher Education James Lawless has said.
Speaking in Belfast following meetings with leading Queen’s University figures, including vice-chancellor Ian Greer, Mr Lawless said he wanted to see more students crossing the Border in both directions to study.
“That’s really important. It’s so important that we continue to have those links and human networks, the best way to get to know somebody is to sit in a lecture hall with them, or to sit and drink coffee with them or something stronger afterwards.
“That’s how we bond as humans,” he went on, adding that changes made to the Central Applications Office qualifying conditions should make it easier for northern students wanting to go to third-level institutions from September.
The number of northerners coming south has fallen dramatically in recent years, partly because students from there with three top-quality A Levels were still unable to meet points targets set for the most prestigious courses.
It is far from clear that the changes – which allow A Level students to add points from an AS course, essentially the result of the first year of an A Level subject, will ease the way for northerners, since most students study no more than 3 A Levels.
The situation was complicated further by the grade inflation that has taken place in the years during and after the Covid pandemic, which helped to put some courses beyond the reach of Northern Ireland applicants.
There are complications, too, in the other direction, though far more students from the Republic are now receiving third-level education in Northern Ireland than happens the other way round.
Queen’s University, Belfast, for example, now takes 600 students from the Republic each year, but it gets more than 6,000 applications. Each place that goes to someone from the South, however, brings QUB closer to breaching the student cap on all UK third-level institutions
Mr Lawless said a review will be carried out of how the CAO changes have worked in this round and changes will be made, if necessary.
For years Northern Ireland has suffered a “brain drain” of many of its best students who go to colleges and universities in Britain but then build lives there afterwards and never come back to Northern Ireland.
Acknowledging that some students will want to go to Oxford and Cambridge because of their international standing, Mr Lawless said he would see “no good reason why a student wouldn’t actually travel to the South.
“That’s one of the things I’m trying to encourage, particularly with this issue with the CO now being fixed. I hope it will start to restore that tide of northern students coming south.”
The connections made last a lifetime, he said: “I have friends in the North, I have friends who studied with me back in the late 90s, who were northern, who are now scattered across northern society and academia and politics and law and everything else.”
The Republic offers “quite strong and generous” incentives to Northern Irish students, since they are treated exactly as those from the Republic and able to apply for all of the available grants.
