Colleges have for years turned away students but the emphasis is now on finding them, writes Emmet Oliver, Education Correspondent.
It has often been said the one true law of economics is the law of supply and demand. It is a law which is very hard to buck, as some of the greatest brains in the country in our third-level colleges are currently finding out.
With the youth population shrinking fast, as pointed out by Prof Michael Laver in his memo circulated to deans in Trinity College, the colleges have a major problem for the next five to 10 years - putting bums on lecture seats.
While Prof Laver's warning was circulated among Trinity's deans and Trinity itself has probably the least to worry about, all universities and institutes of technology are going to have to work hard at filling their lecture halls.
It is a problem for the colleges, but not necessarily for students who now have a greater choice of courses than ever before.
Last year the first signs of the demographic shifts could be seen. Science at UCD was down 45 points and 40 at DCU, while medicine, for so long out of reach of even high performers, fell at the Royal College of Surgeons, UCD and NUI Galway.
The drops in points gave a chance to students who would normally be excluded from such courses and this is regarded by most observers as essentially a good thing. But the slippage in points does raise a far more thorny problem, which is referred to by Prof Laver in his memorandum, written during his time as registrar and released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The problem is if the points are set to tumble, far more students with lower Leaving Cert scores will be admitted into the groves of academia. Good thing surely? But what if they cannot cope with the material, and failure and drop-out rates start to shoot up? Nobody is doing students a favour by putting them on courses they cannot cope with or ones which they fail to finish.
As the chairman of the HEA, Dr Don Thornhill, pointed out last year the self-esteem of a student can be severely dented if they are forced to drop out of a course they have proved unsuitable for.
This is the problem facing the colleges. While Government policy is to get more students into college, and more students of differing backgrounds, this is easier said in policy papers than done on the ground.
Prof Laver in his memo points out that several computer and language courses in Trinity have failure rates of over 20 per cent, although the patterns need to be studied on a more long-term basis to be certain of what is truly going on. But there will be a tough juggling act to be done by college administrators in the next few years.
On the one hand academics at their colleges will want assurances that academic standards will be maintained, but on the other if thousands of students cannot meet the standards and are dropping out, college administrators will be under pressure to keep students in the system somehow.
But how? These dilemmas are addressed by Prof Laver and are being studied at Trinity and other universities at present. Among the solutions is simply to accept higher failure rates as the cost of letting in some weaker students.
This laissez-faire approach when broached at Trinity met resistance and would be deeply unpopular understandably with parents and students.
Another option is to put more resources into teaching at third- level so that students are better able to meet the standards. Another possibility is obviously to make courses easier, at least in first year, but this is not something likely to pass muster with the colleges or the Government.
The problems are most acute in science and computers, with many of the top universities already finding it hard to fill their quota of places. The now well-rehearsed story of the dotcom crash is also likely to have at least a superficial effect on the perception of these courses among young people.
So the search for students to enter these courses will get harder. The colleges will have to ask themselves how far they are prepared to drop their entry requirements before the whole exercise becomes a farce. With some courses, according to HEA figures released last year, losing half their students before the final year, some courses are already becoming a farce in terms of student retention.