Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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91. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of persons who have accepted CAO offers in each of the past ten years; the number of persons who have dropped out of college in each of the past ten years, in tabular form; if a college-by-college breakdown can be provided on this figure; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [6663/23]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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The CAO data regarding the number of accepted offers requested by the Deputy was sourced from the CAO website: www.cao.ie/index.php?page=mediapack&bb=mediastatsThis data is from 2019 to 2021, and is contained in the spreadsheet at the link.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are autonomous and manage their own academic affairs including admissions procedures. The CAO process applications for undergraduate courses on behalf of the HEIs. Neither the Minister nor the Department have a role in the operation of the CAO. I would advise the Deputy to contact the CAO for the data sought before 2019.

The key source of statistics on students in higher education is the HEA's student records system (SRS) which records enrolments as at March of every academic year, giving a single point of reference. Therefore, data is not available on a national level on students who leave their programme during the course of the academic year.

The HEA publish data on the non-progression of students, specifically the non-progression of first-year new entrants. The most recent report is available on-line at www.hea.ieand presents the non-progression of entrants to Level 6, Level 7 and Level 8 fulltime courses commencing in the academic years 2017/18, 2018/19 and 2019/20. The information is available at: hea.ie/statistics/data-for-download-and-visualisations/students/progression/progression-introduction/

Please note the definition employed in this analysis: Non-progression refers to the student not being present in the HEA data in the following academic year. This data does not exclude the small number of students who transfer to different HEIs in year 2 or who leave and return to study in a subsequent academic year. Also, data is only available for first-year new entrants.

The following table gives the overall non-progression rates by NFQ level.