Further Education Outcomes - Graduation Year 2021

Cohort Definition

Excluded Categories of Students

Mature graduates are excluded from this study as their outcomes may be strongly influenced by their working experience prior to enrolling in a further education course. Threshold ages for young and mature graduates are shown below in Terminology.

Graduates enrolled in apprenticeships are not considered in this publication and will be explored in a separate release.

Graduates of minor, special purpose or supplemental awards are excluded from this study.

Missing PPSN

All graduates (including graduates with missing/invalid PPSNs) are included in QQI Data. Since a valid PPSN is required for linking to administrative datasets, those graduates which do not have an associated PPSN must be excluded and hence, outcomes analysis exclude graduates with missing or invalid PPSNs. Amongst the 2017-2021 graduates, less than fifteen had missing PPSNs in each year.

Graduates with more than one Graduation per Year

Graduates could complete more than one QQI major award in a single year and hence, are recorded as having received more than one QQI Major award in a single year. It was desirable for the purposes of data matching that there be only one graduation record per year per individual. Hence, the total number of unique graduates were used throughout this report. In cases where an individual graduated from more than one major award per year, then the following criteria were applied (in the same order) to select one graduation per individual per year:

• If any one award was an apprenticeship, then the apprenticeship took precedence over all other awards completed in that year;
• The award with the highest NFQ Level was selected;
• An award of any award title took precedence over awards with the award titles 'General Learning' or 'General Studies';
• Awards of any field of study took precedence over awards in Generic Programmes & Qualifications;
• In the case that no single award could be selected, then the latter award was kept.

Rounding

Throughout this report, individual figures have been rounded to the nearest five and thus, the sum of individual components may not add up to the totals shown. Also, all percentages have been calculated using rounded figures and may not add up to 100. 

Terminology

Young/Mature Graduates

For distinction of young and mature graduates, a threshold age for young and mature graduates was defined. A graduate must be aged 25 and under at the time of graduation to be classified as 'Young'. Thus, graduates over the age of 25 at the time of graduation are classified as 'Mature'. The same criteria are used in several reports in the area of further education.

NFQ Level

The Irish National Framework for Qualifications (NFQ) is a framework which classifies learning achievement based on the level of knowledge, skill and competence (see NFQ website). The NFQ is a framework through which all learning achievements may be measured and related to each other in a coherent way. In this report, the outcomes of graduates of awards at NFQ Levels 1 to 6 are examined. In the Outcomes analysis, higher education is explored, whereby Levels 6 to 9 are mentioned. NFQ Level 6 awards are advanced certificates or higher certificates, Level 7 awards are primarily ordinary bachelor's degrees and Level 8 awards are primarily honours bachelor's degrees. Level 9 awards include master's degrees and postgraduate diplomas. NFQ Level is used as an analysis variable throughout this report since it is fully standardised.

Field of Study

The fields of study referred to in this report are based on the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) broad fields, which is the UNESCO classification system for education and training (see UNESCO website).

NACE

NACE represents the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community. The industry sectors in this report are based on the alphabetical letter of the NACE code under Revision 2 (see Eurostat website).  In cases where a graduate had more than one employment in a single year, then the NACE code associated with that individual for that year was taken from the main employer. Note that the NACE code is associated with the main activity of the employer, rather than that of the employee.

Outcome Definitions

There are five classifications that describe graduate activities within each calendar year. 

• Substantial Employment only. This refers to graduates who meet minimum criteria for substantial employment or self-employment and are not enrolled in higher education within the same calendar year.
• Substantial Employment and Education. This refers to graduates that meet the criteria for substantial employment or self-employment and are also enrolled in higher education at some point within the same year. 
• Education only. This refers to graduates that are enrolled in higher education but are not in substantial employment.
• Neither Employment nor Education. This refers to graduates who do not meet the criteria above but have some activity in administrative records for that year. These graduates may have some record of (non-substantial) employment or claimed some benefit in that year.
• The remaining individuals are categorised as Not Captured. This means that they have no activity in the administrative data sources for that year. Most of this group are assumed to have emigrated, but there is no definitive indicator of emigration available in the administrative data.

Earnings and Main Employment

Employment data from Revenue includes one record for each occupation of every individual. Each record includes the number of weeks of insurable work and the gross pay received by the employee. It does not include the hourly wage or the number of hours worked. The Main Employer for each individual is the one which contributes the single largest pay to that individual over the course of the year. The Weekly Earnings for each individual is found using data from the main employer only, and is calculated as the gross pay divided by the number of weeks of insurable work. Revenue's PAYE Modernisation system (PMOD) introduced on 1st January 2019 is the new way of gathering employment data and allows “real-time” analysis of tax and employment data.

For further details, see the accompanying ELD methodology documentation.

Revisions

Some minor revisions have been made to this report compared to the previous one. 

HEA and Self-employment Data

The education and employment data sources used in the previous report have been revised since its publication in 2019. Since the previous report, the Higher Education Authority (HEA) enrolment data was updated for the 2018 calendar year with enrolment records from the 2018/19 academic year. These were not included in the previous report. Since the last report was published in 2019, there was also a significant number of self-employment returns filed for the 2018 calendar year and revisions for previous years.

The effect of these revisions is an increase of 2,605 graduates, in the current release compared to previously, that were in both employment and education across all outcome years from 2011 to 2018. This cohort was previously not captured between 2011 and 2018.

Education Outcomes

A revision was made to the methodology of the HEA data used to measure education outcomes. An individual may be enrolled in two higher education courses within the same calendar year (for example, 2016) which corresponds to two academic years (2015/16 and 2016/17).

Previously, in such circumstances the HEA enrolment record was kept using the following criteria:

• If the student graduated from one of the courses
• If the course was funded by Springboard
• The later academic year (2016/17 in the example above)

The revised methodology only keeps the first academic year (2015/16 in the example above) to simplify the education outcome analysis of QQI graduates. For example, a FET learner who graduates in 2015 enrols in a HEA course in the 2015/16 and 2016/17 academic years. Their outcome one year after graduation is the 2016 calendar year and the 2015/2016 academic year. This revision affects the NFQ level and field of study outcomes for FET graduates re-enrolling in education.