Sir, - Last Monday's edition of your newspaper reported extensively on the HEA report on failure/drop-out rates from university. The report identified computer studies as having the highest drop-out rate of all courses in all universities. This pattern is evident also in the other third-level sector, institutes of technology, some of which report a 50 per cent dropout/failure rate among first-year computing students. This is occurring at a time when there are about 3,000 immediate vacancies that cannot be filled for graduates of these courses.
Most worrying for those of us working in this area is that although additional places have been created over the past five years in these highly sought-after courses, these have yielded very few extra graduates, if any. The extra places were created - at considerable cost to Irish taxpayers - to produce more graduates to meet the market's demand. The reasons for such high failure rates need to be further investigated. The role played by career guidance counsellors must also be examined. It is clear that many students have little or no knowledge of the nature of these programmes. The fact that computer studies is not a Leaving Certificate subject does not help; we must be unique among developed countries in this regard.
Students themselves must take some of the responsibility for their own actions. Very poor attendance is endemic throughout institutes of technology. In my experience, a first-year lecture group that starts out with 60 students will have 40 regular attenders by Christmas and 20 to 25 by Easter. Surveys at this institute show that many students are working part-time, in some cases for more than 30 hours per week. While it is undoubtedly true that some students need to work to finance their studies, there is another group (in my view the majority) who work to finance their social lives. Could the knock-on effect of part-time working and frequent partying/holidaying - I've noticed a trend recently towards winter skiing holidays - be a large contributing factor to the poor rates of completion in computing and other third-level courses? - Is mise,
Denis Cummins, M.Sc., Head of Mathematics and Computing, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Co Louth.