Professor Brian Norton:

We have a retention office. We conduct exit interviews. We are a part of national student surveys. Great attention is given to this issue. The reasons are different course by course. Due to how the CAO system works, many students in level 6 or 7 programmes may have been unsuccessful in accessing level 8 programmes and have not prepared for the programmes as they would have done had those been the students' first choices. There are a range of issues in that regard.

We are a practice-oriented institution in the centre of Dublin. Some students who gain skills during the course of their programmes prefer to enter into employment instead of graduating because of the salary offerings. There are other reasons than negative ones for dropping out. Those students may rejoin us in subsequent years. This issue is more complex in some institutes than in others.