#statisitics

I recently came across some data from the Irish Department of Education & Skills on students attending a third-level institution in a particular county and the county they are domiciled.

The data was quite neat and goes back many years, I was inspired to compare the data for a few years and see how things changed. I compared 2004 with 2014. Needless to say allot has changed in Ireland over this period. Educationally, socially, economically, and politically Ireland was a very different place in 2004.

Looking at Dublin, there are allot more students studying in Dublin in 2014 than in 2004, 64,177 vs. 50,833. This represents an overall increase of 26.25%. 7,790 of this 13,340 (58.3%) increase is attributed to more students from Dublin attending third-level education within their own County.

Looking at the national picture there are several patterns Counties in the Republic all show an increase in the amount of students going to Dublin for third-level, in addition there are less students attending from the six counties of Northern Ireland.

Although all counties in the Republic saw an increase in real terms, this was challenged when understood as proportions, in fact, 18 counties all sent more students to Dublin in 2014 but their proportion of the total students in Dublin shrank. 

Some Counties, particularly those along the east coast kept up in terms of both real number of students and proportion of total student.

I think at this stage it would foolish to draw any major conclusions, and I would like to get a better idea of the whole picture, this exercise  has raised further questions that I will hopefully try to answer over the following weeks, for example:

How did things look for the years between 2004 & 2014?

What was the pattern like for other Counties that contain third-level institutions?

Taking all third-level institutions into account, were certain counties better represented at a national level in 2014 than in 2004?

Was there a ‘cannibalization’ affect?

How did changing student support & granting structures impacted the figures? 

You can find the statistics I used on the Department of Trade & Skills website.

My previous posts on the topic:

SOME FRIGHTENING STATISTICS ABOUT SMALL BUSINESS: I’m about to share some frightening statistics taken from 2013 census :

Out of 469,118 businesses, 439,920 had less than 10 employees

That’s 94%! 

74% of these are deemed uninterested in or unsuitable for expansion

55% self employed people are age 40 – 59

Average wage small business owners pay themselves is $40,000