With extra college places, will CAO points fall for high-points courses like medicine and dentistry?

My daughter is filling out her CAO form but isn’t sure she’ll get the points for courses like veterinary, medicine, dentistry or paramedical courses. I read recently that additional places have been created in these programmes. Might points fall next year as a result?

It may seem premature to state it, but there are signs that the CAO “points race” as we know it may be coming to an end for many courses.

This hyper-competitive system was never more than a manifestation of an imbalance between the number of students coming through our second-level schools and the capacity of our third-level system to facilitate that demand.

The advent of the Department of Further and Higher Education – as envisaged by Micheál Martin – and the release of €130 million from the employers’ National Training Fund has created the circumstances to substantially increase the number of places on offer.

Six new degree programmes in medicine, pharmacy and dentistry will begin to come on stream from next year. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) will receive support for a new bachelor of dental surgery, which will provide 20 new dentistry places for Irish or EU students from next year onwards.

Atlantic Technological University (ATU), and South East Technological University (SETU) will introduce two new veterinary degrees doubling the numbers of places on offer to Irish/EU applicants.

Both, alongside the University of Galway, will introduce new pharmacy programmes, doubling the number of pharmacy training programmes in Ireland. At full roll-out, these courses will provide more than 150 additional pharmacy graduates per year.

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University of Galway will also introduce a “rural and remote graduate entry” stream for medicine, addressing the shortage of general practitioners in rural Ireland. At full roll-out, this will provide 48 additional medicine places per year.

University of Limerick (UL) will launch a direct-entry medicine programme, building on its experience as a provider of graduate-entry medicine.

The overall expansion also includes a 2022 agreement with Irish medical schools that introduced 60 additional places for Irish and EU students, with a goal of 200 additional places annually by 2026, alongside a 35 per cent increase in training places in areas such as speech and language therapy and occupational therapy, with new courses in universities such as University of Galway and University of Limerick.

CAO points are, simply, a reflection of supply and demand. Supply is finally increasing, which should see entry points begin to fall across many of these programmes.

Hopefully, once the heat it taken out of the CAO points race, we will come to regard it as a historic anomaly rather than a foundational pillar of our third level education system.

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