Professor Emer Smyth:

We just worked on the patterns. While that may be the case for postgraduate level, it is not the case for undergraduate level. That aspect has been quite stable. In fact, there has been a longer term decline since about 2010 in the number of students going from Ireland to Northern Ireland. On the MASN, we should have mentioned this in the context of the previous point. There is little incentive for Northern Irish higher education institutions to encourage applicants from the South because they are capped on numbers. There are 1.7 applicants per place in Northern Ireland, so there is this big outflow of about 13,000 or 14,000 students annually to the rest of the UK. There is little incentive, therefore, for the institutions in the North to do outreach with schools in Ireland. To be fair, they do, but the MASN is a major issue for students from Ireland and Northern Ireland.