Higher education institutions are deliberately driving up CAO points in order to create an illusion of quality and an impression of competition for third-level places, the former president of Maynooth University Philip Nolan has said.
Addressing second-level school principals at a symposium on senior cycle education and the points system, Professor Nolan accused universities and colleges of "gaming" and misusing the points system in order to "manufacture prestige" and market their courses to students.
In remarks highly critical of the sector, he said colleges are maintaining and creating multiple courses with small intakes in order to keep points levels high.
He said high points then lead students to think 'that must be a great course' and ‘It’s hard to get into that institution therefore that institution must be very good’.
"Unfortunately this culture has developed in Ireland, that a high-points course means it's a good course and that means that institutions are motivated to keep the points high," Mr Nolan said.
He said a small number of courses, such as medicine, had high points because there was high demand, but there was no objective rationale for high points for many other courses.
Amid competition between institutions for students, Mr Nolan said "we need to stop using points as some kind of proxy for quality".
Criticising the high number of courses across the sector, he said institutions were creating "elite cohorts within subject areas".
"There is a practice of excluding applicants to keep points high, and of setting tacit minimum points requirements to exclude ‘weaker’ students."
He said institutions created a course with an attractive title and limited places, and that this was the recipe for high points.
Calling for a return to broad entry routes for students, Prof Nolan said that since the creation of the CAO the number of courses offered had increased 15-fold, while the number of applicants had only increased six-fold.
In the 1980s students could choose between 75 distinct third-level courses. Now the number of courses on offer is a little over 1,100.
Professor Nolan, who is also a former vice-president of UCD, questioned why UCD had only 40 entry routes while universities such as DCU or University of Galway had considerably more. DCU offers 71 different choices to students, while UG offers 65.
"A good starting point would be that no institution should have more than 25 entry routes," he said.
Instancing one DCU course called Global Business, with points of 617, he asked "why are we asking a student to choose ‘Global Business’ as opposed to just ‘Business’?"
He also said individual deans and heads of faculties did not like the points for their courses dipping and so points levels were "managed".
Read more: Surge of 6.5% in CAO applications this year
Students’ perception of how good a course is was based on its points, and this was "a real hazard that needs to be addressed," Prof Nolan said.
Prof Nolan was not alone in his criticisms. A senior official from the Department of Education and Youth accused higher education institutions of "manipulating" the points system.
"There is definitely a sense that the status of having high points feeds into your global rankings," Assistant Secretary General Aoife Conduit told the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPD) conference.
"Students have 1,144 programmes to choose from. That is completely unnecessary," Ms Conduit said, adding that students are "pressurised into using the points system as currency".
Drawing a distinction between perception and reality, she said a small number of high-points courses, mainly in health, were driving perception and behaviours in senior cycle students, most of whom were not aspiring to those courses.
The perception was that the "points race" makes it difficult to access higher education, and that 'everything' relies on the Leaving Cert.
The reality, she said, was that 80% of students got a first-round offer of one of their top three choices, and that with average points of 400-449 a student can access 73.4% of all courses.
The NAPD organised the symposium called ‘Senior Cycle Redevelopment: What’s the Points?’.
It said while the universities had agreed to expanding general entry routes - which allow broader access at first-year level with students specialising later - they had not acted on that promise.
The organisation called for full transparency from the universities around student offers and retention figures, as well as around the methodology behind points calculations.
"If a system is genuinely fair and transparent, this information should be readily available," the NAPD said.
Responding to today's criticisms, the Irish Universities Association (IUA) said that within a broader competitive higher education and funding environment, "it is to be expected that higher education providers seek to attract eligible students, including those students who achieve high grades in the Leaving Certificate, to study at their institutions".
"While many universities offer broad first year entry routes into engineering, arts, science, etc, where students can specialise as they advance through the undergraduate curriculum, many higher education providers also offer smaller, bespoke courses in particular fields of study, often in response to employer demand.
"It is the case that such courses, given the smaller number of places and the higher demand, often result in higher entry points requirements."
It said IUA universities keep all aspects of the admissions process under regular review, "with the aim of achieving the twin goals of promoting academic excellence and supporting people from every community and background with the potential to access higher education to do so supportively and sustainably".
