Keep your CAO choices as broad as possible

Given the growing economic crisis and the rapid increase in unemployment across a wide range of sectors of our economy, many current Leaving Cert students pondering their future careerare deeply uncertain how they should proceed.

Many older brothers and sisters of this year's Leaving Certificate cohort, who have recently graduated from college, or who have been working for a number of years, are currently unemployed. This is giving rise to huge concern among the 70,000-plus potential applicants to the CAO, who ask seeking places in college in September 2009.

The best advice I can give to all those considering their CAO application at this time is to remember that if you are going to start an undergraduate programme in September 2009, you will be finishing your undergraduate programme in June 2012 at the earliest. If you are one of the 50 per cent of undergraduates who then proceed to a postgraduate programme, your entry date into the labour force will probably be June 2014. The question you must therefore ask yourself is how the labour market might be for your favourite discipline in 2014. The real answer is that nobody knows and the only sensible course of action for you to take is to follow the path that your natural inclinations suggest. Keep your options broad, so as to increase your choices.

A second piece of advice I would give is to keep your CAO choices as broad as you can- unless you are absolutely certain that you want to follow a particular career path such as dentistry, architecture or so on. Students taking an arts, science or law degree will have a huge degree of flexibility in the careers they wish to explore in three years' time. Students who select career specific areas, particularly those that are experiencing rapid changes due to advances in technology - such as media and journalism - may be more limited in their career options in three years' time.

Following the publication by The Irish Times and other newspapers of the progression rates of second-level students in the Republic of Ireland into publicly-funded colleges of the CAO and to colleges in the UK and Northern Ireland through USAC, many people have questioned me about the discrepancy in the progression rates as reported in different publications.

The Irish Times reported the progression rates of students who attended a particular school or private fee-paying college outside the State-funded sector, commonly known as "grind" schools, into the publicly-funded colleges of the CAO and USAC. Other newspapers reported the same progression rates, but based their figures on the number of students who actually "sat" the examination in a particular school or grind school in June 2008.

What is the difference between "attending" and "sitting" the Leaving Certificate in a school or grind school?

Every school and grind school registers the students who "attend" their college with the State Examinations Commission, which passes this information on to the CAO, which passes it on to the third-level colleges. In this way, they know the school or grind school that every students who accepts a first-year undergraduate place "attended". These are the figures, supplied by the colleges, which every newspaper publishes.

The different percentage success-rate figures published by newspapers arise from the fact that if a student "sits" the examination in a school that is not the one he/she is registered as having "attended", this increases the "sit" figure for that school and decreases the "sit" figure of the college he actually "attended".

If he/she secures a place in college, he/she will be credited to the school or grind school he studied at, but counted as having sat the examination elsewhere, thus increasing that school's "sit" figure, and decreasing its reported success rate.

A school with 90 students, of whom 45 secure a college place, has a success rate of 50 per cent. If 10 students from a local grind school "sit" the examination in the local school that school's "sits" figure increases, but as none of these candidates will be credited to the school, its success rate drops to 45 per cent. The grind school, on the other hand, which has 200 students, of whom 120 secure a college place, has a success rate of 60 per cent. If, however, 80 of these students sit the examination elsewhere, its success rate increases to 100 per cent.

The Irish Times uses the only accurate measure of the success rate of schools and grind schools by measuring success rates based on the school attended, rather that where a student happened to "sit" the examination.

Brian Mooney is a guidance counsellor at Oatlands College, Dublin and a former president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors