With everything in the economic garden looking a little less rosy, making the right choices is even more important for this year's applicants. Education correspondent Emmet Oliver reports.

Students hoping to go to college later this year could be forgiven for feeling a little awkward and resentful right now.

With record growth rates for almost a decade, near full employment and a jobs bonanza for the majority of graduates, the 1990s were good for their brothers and sisters all right, but what of the futures of this year's school-leavers?

Have they arrived too late for the party? Will they be the ones to suffer the economic hangover as the labour market tightens and third-level qualifications lose their lustre?

The last few years have certainly been good for the majority of graduates. According to the statistics from the Higher Education Authority (HEA), at the start of the 1990s almost 10 per cent of them were unemployed a year after leaving college.

Think about it. One in 10. That statistic must seem surreal to those who went to college during the last five years, when virtually no one talked about getting a job, but instead chatted endlessly about getting a high-paying job, in an area you liked, preferably with plenty of travel prospects and a large expense account.

The HEA's report on the destination of third-level graduates who left college in 1999 and were surveyed in 2000 used the work "shocking" to describe the tiny number of students (1.5 per cent) "seeking employment" a year after college. This was the lowest level since modern records began.

It was also the culmination of a long-term trend which started back in the 1980s. While nobody knows the outcome for the years ahead, it is clear this figure is likely to rise to some degree.

What will probably help is that the number of students entering the third-level system in the next five years is falling, so the rush for jobs and, crucially, places on postgraduate courses should not be too frantic.

The students going to college later this year will also probably follow other patterns which have been set in recent years. One of these trends is for students to take a "gap year" between graduating and work. This is a modern phenomenon which barely registered in the HEA's statistics back in the early 1990s.

However, according to the last set of figures available, the number of graduates "not available for work or study" (the classification covers different groups, but mainly refers to students taking a year out or travelling abroad) was almost 4 per cent.

According to sources, a large segment of this group are made up of those travelling to Australia and the southern hemisphere generally. Employers have plenty of good things to say about people who do this, and nobody is going to think less of students who broaden their range of experiences by using the year constructively, either at home or abroad.

The number of students staying on to do a postgraduate qualification has been falling in recent years, with many college faculties despairing of ways to get students to consider further study over a job. This battle may be easier when students consider the incipient jobs market expected to emerge in the next year or two, according to despondent reports from FAS and the IDA.

ANOTHER factor that has exerted downward pressure on the postgraduate numbers has been the free-fees initiative.

While they were scrapped many years ago for full-time undergraduate courses, fees are continuing to climb for postgrad courses and this has put off many students (and their parents), who have been looking at the rosy jobs market and deciding that further study is for mugs.

But it may not be a mug's game in the future. Getting a postgraduate qualification is increasingly required for a range of jobs, particularly in the areas of business, arts and science. There is also a range of financial supports now in place to help those engaged in postgraduate research.

The figures from the HEA in recent years bear out the attractiveness of staying on after your primary degree.

For example, whereas almost 50 per cent of primary degree-holders from the class of 1999 got a job in the State a year after finishing, almost 65 per cent of those with a postgraduate qualification got a job at home, with almost 17 per cent finding the right opportunity overseas. So, in the years to come, the postgraduate route may be the best protection against unemployment.

The point is illustrated most starkly at the DIT and at other institutes of technology. For example, the number of certificate/diploma students continuing their studies between 1998 and 1999 rose by 14 per cent. This would seem to give a clear signal to those planning to do a certificate or diploma course - be prepared, you make have to take the longer route if you want to land that chance-of-a-lifetime job.

WHETHER you decide to leave after getting your primary qualification or at a later stage, the lure of going abroad still exerts a powerful hold on the student imagination.

Almost 7 per cent of graduates (undergraduates and postgraduates) got a job overseas, according to the most recently available HEA figures. Other EU states proved the most popular destination for primary degree-holders, with France and Germany leading the way. Britain, which is categorised separately, was the second most popular destination, followed by the United States.

Whether the opportunities come at home or abroad, you can only grasp them if you pick up a qualification at the end of your course. A huge problem in the Republic at present, though it is often worse in other economies, is students not finishing their courses.

The so-called "dropout" or non-completion problem is not something colleges are keen to talk about, but it does enormous damage to the self-confidence of thousands of the students who, each year, find themselves in unsuitable courses or who are simply alienated from the whole third-level experience.

An invaluable guide to the non-completion problem can be found on the HEA's website (www.hea.ie) where a report by researchers at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin, gives a detailed breakdown of the dropout rates on a course-by-course basis. The figures are unfortunately a little old, but in the absence of fresher ones, they offer the most informed view available.

What they spell out is that there are deeply worrying dropout rates in computer and science courses in particular. Many observers believe this factor is due to students not being able for the challenging maths content on these courses.

SO BE aware, very aware. Computer and science courses carry a health warning and are for people who like those disciplines, people who are good with figures and who have proved it to some degree in their Leaving Cert exam. They are not for people who think they have found an easy way to be the next Bill Gates. Then again Gates, the Microsoft founder, actually did drop out of college, for better or worse!

Cover photograph by Frank Miller. Picture posed by Niamh Clare