Students flee to safety of familiar courses due to hi-tech worries

The Class of 2002 are in good shape to secure their college places. Withluck, they can also secure their choice of career, writes Emmet Oliver,Education Correspondent

Tycoon Henry Ford once said: "You cannot learn in school what the world is going to do next year," and this year's 56,000 Leaving Cert students should understand that more than most.

For the Class of 2002, the exam, even with all its forbidding associations, is one of the few predictable things in their life at present. Everything else appears in flux.

Well paid graduate jobs used to be as plentiful as potholes in Cavan, but now everyone is having to scale down their expectations. There are still jobs, lots of them, but the chances of landing your dream job straight out of college is now seriously remote.

The big multinationals (always bellweathers for the rest of the economy) are hiring again, but the numbers are relatively small and nothing on the scale of the recruitment that took place in the late 1990s.

The fallout from September 11th and the slump in the hi-tech sector have taken their toll on confidence and while these global events seem remote to the average student studying alone in his or her room, they are actually of great relevance.

Look at the CAO figures for this year: there has been an unprecedented 25 per cent drop in applications for computer and technology courses. This was not some kind of random and scattered occurrence; this was students and their parents consciously reacting to the apparent hi-tech melt-down and voting with their feet.

Like parents the world over, the fathers and mothers who are caught up in the exam process want what is best for their children. This has manifested itself this year in a lurch back to the security and familiarity of the more traditional areas, with law, teaching and the humanities getting a boost, and science, computers and engineering taking a nosedive.

Since then, various State agencies, the IDA, IBEC and career guidance counsellors have tried to entice the class of 2002 back into the hi-tech fold. A Statewide campaign is running along these lines, but its promoters have their work cut out, with parents obviously deciding in many cases that the dot.com dream has become the dot.bomb nightmare.

However, like a lot of things this year, one person's difficulty is another person's opportunity. The 25 per cent drop in computer-oriented applications should force points down for a range of courses and if you are interested in information technology (IT), science or engineering, you could get under the wire this year without too much difficulty.

Choosing your career direction at age 17 or 18 involves some very fine judgments - and who truly knows whether deserting the computer sector this year is inspired or foolish?

Those in the industry say it may be a mistake, as the sector is going to grow massively over the next five years, with plenty of rewarding and well paid jobs available. They cite travel and the chance to innovate as the main attractions in the industry, even if security tends to be a little further down the list.

Brian Mooney, a guidance counsellor from Dublin's Oatlands College and president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, said last week that without the engine of IT many parts of the economy, including the old reliable professions such as law and accountancy, would lose their buoyancy.

Students and their parents - let's face it - are not that interested in the general economic fate of the country, but more in their own futures. Those futures, despite the post-September 11th gloom and the cruel death of the Celtic Tiger, are still bright.

The sharp drop in the number of students, for one, is a great cause of hope for this year's group. There are several thousand fewer students doing the exam this year compared to even four years ago. This is good news for points.

The more cautious will tell you that points can never be predicted. They are right, but the CAO points system is the purest example one can find of supply and demand - and if demand is going down, points will follow.

Of course that does not mean medicine at UCD or Trinity is going to suddenly require only 400 points, but it does mean the general trend is downward.

With the overall number of science applications at degree level falling from 46,572 last year to 41,707 this year, points for all kinds of science courses also look set to plunge, including those in the universities.

Engineering should also be a little easier to get into, but points are likely to remain beyond many for high-profile options such as UCD and TCD's engineering degrees.

There is little likelihood of any great change for healthcare courses such as medicine, dentistry and physiotherapy. They attracted similar levels of interest to last year, though applications for physiotherapy were up by almost 700 and those looking to get into that area will need to put in a strong exam performance.

Despite the current tension between government and the teacher unions, the demand for teacher-training college places increased this year. There was a total of 19,753 applications for education courses this year compared to 18,435 last year.

With points for university courses slipping, you can expect something similar at the institutes of technology, with many courses simply requiring AQA - meaning they will take students with the basic minimum entry requirements. (AQA means All Qualified Applicants.)

In the case of the ITs, this normally means a few passes at ordinary level will suffice. So even a relatively low points score can open up a range of courses.

Some of these may be a certificate to start out with, but you can eventually work your way up to degree level. You do not hear about these alternative ways into the groves of academe because it is the nature of the points battle that those at the top get the most media attention.

But you must remember that only about 2 per cent of Leaving Cert candidates get over 550 points. The average points score is about 325. So anybody who gets anywhere near that total is doing very well.

The Class of 2002 seem to be a sensible group who proceed cautiously and listen to those around them. Research by admissions officers suggest that despite being aged 17 or 18, these students consult their chief advisers - their parents - regularly.

Radicals will sneer at teenagers so dependent on their parents, but this year's group can sneer back that at least they are not led by their peers or those terrible people in the meeja.