2026-05-12

158. Deputy Matt Carthy asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science if his Department has carried out any analysis of university courses in which maximum leaving certificate points did not guarantee admission due to demand; if he will list the courses where this applied alongside the number of places available through the CAO for these courses; the number of places available for international students in those courses, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [34562/26]

My question to the Minister is whether his Department has carried out an analysis of those university courses that have maximum or very high-level CAO points requirement for which some students who meet those points requirement are not successful because of random selection. Will he will list those courses that it will apply to, outline exactly how many places are on those courses and the number of places therein that are available for international students?

As the Deputy will be aware, under legislation, the Irish higher education institutions are autonomous in their decisions and the processes they follow in relation to admissions, and rightly so. They operate without political influence in terms of their admission criteria and enrolment. Both public and private institutions, all use the CAO, which is well understood, to centrally process the applications for most undergraduate programmes. Further information on how that works, including statistics and data from previous years' offers, is all publicly available on the CAO website, if the Deputy wishes to refer to that. Based on publicly available data, my Department has identified the higher education courses where attaining the maximum points from the leaving certificate did not guarantee admission due to high demand. Where that happens, the CAO applies a system of random selection. Going specifically to the Deputy's question as to how many courses did this happen in this year, there was one course where a student was denied entry because of random selection at 625 points. There was a second course but it was not on the first round; it was on the second round. All students on the first round that sought a place received a place. There was one course, that I am aware of, where this happened on the first round. That is the scenario there. On the courses where it has happened, there is a pattern, if you look back over the past number of years, in terms of the courses that have a 625 points target and use random selection in the final rounds. These are dental science, management science and information systems, dentistry, management science and dental science. Going back over the past number of years, those were the courses. Obviously, there is a strong pattern. Briefly, to talk about dental science and dentistry, since it is one of the courses where that has happened in recent years, I am adding another 35 dental beds or, I should say, "chairs", which is what we need for dental places, through the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, RCSI. I opened 20 of them in Sandyford earlier this year and a further 15 are coming on stream next year.

The Minister cannot finish an answer by claiming credit for providing extra places in courses when he started his reply by saying this has to be an autonomous-based system where there is no political interference because political decisions affect the number of places available on courses. I am sure the Minister will accept that. Last year, we are told that entry to 25 undergraduate courses with high level points were determined by random selection. That means people secured very high points in their leaving certificate but were not able to secure their preferred choice because of random selection. Essentially, it was a lottery. The Minister did not answer the question in respect of the number of international students. It is important that we get those answers because the Minister has been quoted as suggesting that some universities are gaming the system. If people are being denied places to courses in areas for which we have shortages in the State and universities are selling places in those courses to international students, that is a problem this House needs to be aware of and informed of.

I am just clarifying. The Deputy's question asked about the courses in which maximum leaving certificate points did not guarantee admission due to demand and he has moved on now to high-points courses. The difference between maximum and high-points is that it is a meritocracy. Rightly or wrongly, the CAO system awards courses on the basis of points. A student had maximum points and missed out on a place, which arose in one instance this year for a course that I mentioned. The other scenario I talked about is where the students that took up the course were students who had higher points than students who missed out. There were students who had the maximum points and students who had points less than that, ultimately, over descending order, until they got to the last place on the course. There were then two students who had the same points but they were not as high as other students who got into the course. One always, of course, feels sympathy for the student in that situation, but it is not the case that students on maximum points were displaced. It is students that did not get maximum points. Put simply, the students with the highest points got the places. In the case of students on lower points, at some point there was a cut-off. Unfortunately, some students missed out, but that is the way across any course in the entire CAO.

Is there a reason the Minister will not answer my question in relation to international students? I have asked it twice now and it was in the written question that was submitted. Here is what we know. There are areas of speciality for which we have chronic shortages in many parts of this State. Dentistry, as the Minister, mentioned is an obvious place. The Irish Dental Association has said that one of the issues is that in many courses which the State has provided for dentistry, a significant proportion of places are actually being sold by universities to international students. That is not a meritocracy. That is a problem that we need to address but we cannot address it unless we have the information. Can the Minister provide the information in respect of these vital courses? I accept it is important that there is an element of international students but is it the case that places that should be filled by people coming through the CAO route are ultimately being sold to the highest bidder on the international market?

Not to my knowledge. My Department does not collect data on the number of international students or the share of places offered through the CAO on a course-by-course basis. That falls under the remit of the individual autonomous higher education institutions and they determine that annually. The Deputy may wish to correspond with them to make his own inquiries. I reiterate my point because the scenario he is depicting is suggesting that some students have been displaced by international students coming into the same course.

I am asking for the information.

In actual fact I do not have the information.

Why not?

It is because these are autonomous institutions that manage their own course and manage their own systems within it. The Deputy is welcome to correspond with them, if he has not done so already, to see what information he can derive. Every student who wanted a course, bar one, got into a course. In the latest CAO round, there was one student in one course in entire country. It is regrettable and I would prefer if no students missed out. I think that we can agree that out of 108,000 students, one student missing out on a place is very regrettable for that individual and I would have preferred if it had not happened. That is why I am increasing the courses by 1,100 place this year alone. The problem is certainly not of the scale the Deputy wishes to depict.