It’s generally accepted that the way students are admitted into university in Ireland is not fair. As Prof Patrick Geoghegan, project sponsor of Trinity’s alternative admissions feasibility study, wrote for The University Times in January: “Leaving Cert results show academic performance at a fixed point in time. Its value is important but limited.” That Trinity, Ireland’s oldest university, has situated itself at the forefront of challenging how students from both the Republic and Northern Ireland are admitted into higher education in this country is, therefore, a very important and progressive thing.
It’s not unusual for the promises or wishes of a leader, whether that be the leader of a country, a company or a university, to never come to fruition. However, we saw Provost Patrick Prendergast state in a press release three years ago that he wanted Trinity to become “a university for the whole island of Ireland”, and that desire has been met by two groundbreaking projects that would serve to make it a reality, the 2013 Northern Irish Engagement Programme and the 2014 A-Level Admission Feasibility Study.
From this September, all seven universities in Ireland are to adopt a new set of admissions criteria for Northern Irish applicants, where students get up to 30 more points for each A-Level. By taking steps before this, Trinity placed itself at the forefront of national change, fighting to ensure third-level education in the Republic of Ireland is available to as many students as possible.
Trinity’s programmes are proving successful. For the next academic year, the number of students applying from Northern Ireland to Trinity has increased by 22 per cent. This number will, all going to plan, increase further. Northern Irish students currently make up about three per cent of the college population and Prendergast has stated his “eventual target” is eight per cent.
It’s easy to praise these programmes when they produce tangible results, but Trinity deserves to be commended for their experimentation in the first place. While only time will tell if they will sufficiently address the issues they were created to solve, Trinity has engaged with and tried to improve an imperfect system, taking a progressive step that has created new dialogue about how we admit students.
