Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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169. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if the policy of providing universities a top-up payment per student enrolled in a course teaching computer science has been successful; the estimated cost of the programme; and the estimated increase in computer science graduates this has lead to. [23209/16]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy will be aware that since 2014, as part of the implementation of the ICT Action Plan 2014 - 2018, all publicly funded higher education institutions have been invited to submit proposals to increase the number of places on courses leading to a Level 8 award in core ICT areas.

For the first two academic years, 2014/15 and 2015/16, the provision of additional places was incentivised by way of an additional €1,000 per place per annum as provided for in the ICT Action Plan with a target of 1,250 incentivised places per academic year.

162 places were provided for 2014/15 and 335 additional places were provided for the 2015/16 academic year.

Following a review of the numbers of places provided under the first two iterations of the scheme, the incentive being offered to HEIs for the additional mainstream places was increased to €2,500 for 2016/17 and the proposed number of incentivised places was set at 500. The graduates from the 2016/17 places will be graduating in 2019 and 2020.

As the incentivised level 8 ICT places commenced in 2014, graduate numbers from the first cohort will not be available until 2018, however it is estimated that there will be over 450 additional Level 8 ICT graduates from the first two iterations of the scheme i.e. from the 2014/15 and 2015/16 cohort.

Depending on the graduation rates, the first two iterations of the scheme for the academic years 2014/15 and 2015/16 combined will cost a maximum of €2 million. While proposals in excess of 500 places were received for the 2016/17 iteration, the exact numbers of additional students will not be available until the autumn, and therefore it is not possible to provide the costs involved in the third iteration of the scheme.