Lucia Orsi, a student from Downpatrick, Co Down, recalls the look of puzzlement from her classmates when she told them of her plans to go to college in Dublin.
Only a handful of students in her year at the Catholic grammar school she attended applied to the CAO; the remainder were staying in the North or applying elsewhere in the UK.
“My mom wanted me to go down – she went to Trinity – and my dad is from Donegal. I honestly think if they hadn’t told me to do it, I wouldn’t have, just because there was no one really there to help you,” she says.
Most students, she says, only had the most fleeting exposure in career guidance classes on what was involved in attending college south of the Border.
“I think we were just sent like a slide show, and you just had to do it yourself. Only four or five students in my whole year of like 120 students applied to the CAO,” says Orsi, a final year English literature student.
Despite the proximity, she is part of a relatively small cohort of students from Northern Ireland who apply to go to college south of the Border.
Students from the North account for just 1 per cent of CAO applications, a figure which has been declining slowly and steadily for the past five years or so.
By contrast, the number of southern students taking up places in northern universities has more than tripled over the past five years.
So, why do so few students from the North attend college in the South?
One key reason is many students receive little or no career guidance advice or support when it comes to applying to college in the South.
Another, say students, is the poor conversion rate for A-level results into CAO points.
Until recently, it was only possible to achieve the maximum 625 points by taking four A-levels, and one of them had to be maths (students typically do only three A-levels).
Under changes announced last year, A-Level candidates can use the best three A Levels, in combination with a fourth A Level or an AS Level or an extended project.
These changes have yet to lead to any increase in CAO applicants from the North this year.
Just over 1,000 of the 83,000-plus applicants to the CAO this year were from the North, or 1.2 per cent, down from just over 1,200 the previous year.
Aoibhinn Brentnall from Belfast recalls convincing herself that she had little chance of being successful when she applied to study her dream course at UCD.
Having attended a Gaelscoil, she was very keen to study law and Irish. Yet, she was acutely aware that poor CAO points conversion rates for A-level results would make it very difficult to compete with Leaving Cert students for college places in the South.
“We can’t get 625 [points] unless we do four A-levels and maths, and people don’t do four A-levels, it’s mostly three. We’d have to do a fourth to even get near those points, which people only do to get to Dublin,” says Brentnall.
When she eventually received her A-level grades, she broke down into tears: against all odds, she had secured a place.
“I didn’t think I got the points and I actually, like, cried all day. My mum was like ‘so you really want to go to UCD?’ But I hadn’t realised before that. Then they altered the [points allocation] system, and I ended up getting the points to get into UCD.”
Sometimes the intervention of a single teacher can be enough to broaden a student’s horizons. Ciara McKenna from south Belfast – now a politics and maths students at UCD – is one of them.
“I really wanted to leave Belfast, I didn’t want to stay there. And it was kind of between Dublin and Scotland for me,” she says. “I had one good careers teacher that was very helpful. But apart from that, most people would be kind of surprised if you were applying to CAO, it wasn’t like a very common thing.”
Another obstacle facing many students from the North is financial: many are all well aware of the shortage of affordable accommodation.
Eoghan Ó Mainnin, a UCD law and history student from Belfast, was drawn to the idea of being able to pursue his interest in Irish history in a top-rated university.
The costs, however, were hair-raising compared to what his friends faced.
At UCD, student accommodation ranges in cost from around €5,666 for a shared room to €12,000 for an academic year.
“Some my friends in Belfast who go to study at Queen’s or Ulster, and then some of my friends who studied in Newcastle, their rent could be anywhere between £80 (about €96) and £110 per week. There are some places in Belfast where you can get a house for £70 a week. So there’s a big financial difference.”
Yet, despite the high costs, there can be strong educational, sporting or cultural attractions to studying south of the Border for many in the North.
In addition to the quality and choice of courses and a chance to experience life in Ireland’s largest city, the opportunity of playing competitive GAA was strong for Toirealach Brolly (22), who studies international relations and French in UCD.
“My family are a very big GAA family and whenever my older brother, who’s two years above me ... whenever he was doing open days for universities and stuff, there was a lot of going down to Dublin,” he says.
“UCD just really caught my eye just because it’s so vast and big – the Gaelic pitches and the gym facilities and stuff just really caught my eye.
“Also, I knew that UCD had a very good politics department because I have a family friend who went there and did international relations. And she very highly praised the course, so that was basically it. I decided quite early on that I just didn’t want to stay in Belfast, I suppose, because it’s too small.”
Despite the high cost of living, the Republic is cheaper in one respect: tuition costs. They are significantly cheaper in the South, where college charges are €2,000, compared with £4,710 (€5,600) in the North and £9,250 (€11,060) in England and Wales.
It was a significant enough factor to convince Dónal Hanna, a student from Belfast, to apply to study financial maths in UCD.
“It’s cheaper than going to England. So, fees here are around two grand and in England they are around 10,” he says. “I didn’t particularly want to stay at home, so the alternative is kind of just here or England.”
Similarly, Vanessa Walker (22), who is studying Spanish and Italian at Trinity, wanted to avoid student debt by moving here.
“The North is cheaper in the lifestyle, the costs and everything, but the entry costs to get into the universities is much higher up north,” she says.
“From the experiences I heard from friends I had there, they built up a lot of debt because they live in North and go on to study in the North. I preferred going to the South, where the college tuition are much, much cheaper.”
For universities in Ireland, these are tentative signs of hope. However, to further increase student mobility, most students agree that much more will need to be done beyond tweaking grade conversion rates.
For now, though, it seems that obstacles in the form of limited career guidance, a shortage of accommodation and the need for extremely high grades mean that many students in the North will continue to look elsewhere.
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