This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
Over 45% of new entrants to honours degrees (NFQ Level 8) received maintenance or fee support from Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI), while the figure for general degrees (NFQ Level 7) was 62%.
For mature honours degree students (aged 23 and over), 71% who received a SUSI support completed their degree compared with 65% of those who did not receive SUSI support.
For honours degree students under the age of 23, 79% of those who received support completed their degree compared with 86% of those who did not receive SUSI support.
Some 70% of mature general degree students (aged 23 years and over) who received SUSI support completed their degree compared with 59% of those without SUSI support.
'Major award with distinction' was achieved by 39% of Post Leaving Certificate (PLC) learners, for those who received SUSI support the figure was 36%.
Over 81% of PLC learners who received SUSI support and 74% of those without support achieved an educational award.
This is a joint publication between the CSO and SUSI. In undertaking this exploratory project, the CSO provided statistical capability to inform SUSI’s analysis of student grant funding. It is envisaged that the project will help accelerate the analysis of SUSI supports and further advance the use of data as a national resource.
This statistical capability support is part of a suite of CSO resources available to public bodies, which also include secondments and Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs). VDRs, in particular, are a service that will provide a secure environment where Public Sector organisations can match their own data with other non-identifiable data provided by other Public Sector organisations.
Public Sector staff working in a VDR become Officers of Statistics with the accompanying legal responsibility of confidentiality and is in line with the CSO’s strategy to provide evidence and insight to inform decision making across all parts of Irish society.
SUSI (Student Universal Support Ireland) is Ireland’s national awarding authority for further and higher education grants. SUSI provides support to eligible students in approved courses at Post Leaving Certificate (PLC), undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and in some cases, to students studying outside Ireland. Support is available to all types of students, from school leavers to mature students returning to education.
In this release, the education and employment outcomes for three specific education cohorts: Honours Degree, General Degree, and PLC, are compiled using the Educational Longitudinal Database (ELD) statistical framework. The ELD is produced by matching datasets on learners that have completed courses or programmes to other datasets which describe their outcomes in subsequent years. The data sources used to describe learner outcomes include employment and self-employment datasets from the Revenue Commissioners, benefits data from the Department of Social Protection, and data on educational participation from the Department of Education and several state agencies, including the Higher Education Authority (HEA), Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) and SOLAS. Throughout the release, the outcomes of those in receipt of SUSI support are presented alongside the outcomes of those who did not receive support. These statistics provide SUSI with evidence about the outcomes of students or learners in receipt of grants and allow for comparison with the wider education population.
To be eligible for SUSI funding, an applicant's household income must fall below specific income thresholds. The household members who are included in the income calculation depend on whether the applicant is classed as dependent or independent by SUSI. Therefore, it is of particular interest for SUSI to examine the outcomes of independent and dependent students separately. The dependency status of those students or learners that did not receive SUSI grants is estimated in this report by matching records with pseudonymised Census 2016 data and implementing an AI classification model. The students or learners without SUSI support classified as either dependent or independent may not be eligible for SUSI funding because of the income thresholds but are assumed to share the same dependency status.
How much funding an eligible SUSI applicant gets depends on the distance they normally live from the college they are going to attend. A higher grant rate is paid to those who live further from the college. The distance criterion for students to qualify for the larger non-adjacent rate of student grant was 45km for the cohorts examined in this release but has since been reduced to 30km for academic years 2022/2023 onwards. The outcomes for adjacent and non-adjacent students are presented separately, and the adjacency status for those who did not receive SUSI support is estimated using exploratory techniques.
This report uses novel methods to classify the wider student cohort, specifically those who were not in receipt of SUSI funding, in a manner similar to how SUSI classify successful grant applicants. These classifications do not imply that those students were eligible for SUSI support but suggest that they would likely be classified in this way had they received SUSI funding. Prior to reading this publication users should note some of the limitations in the methods. These limitations are as follows:
The information needed to assign dependence to those not in receipt of SUSI funding is not currently available in education records. Therefore, an AI model incorporating student characteristics from Census 2016 is used to predict whether the student was likely dependent or independent on entering their third level course.
The model considers two factors, the age of the student, and whether they were noted as a son or daughter of the person who completed the Census form. The older an individual the more likely they are to be classed independent, and those noted as a son or daughter are more likely to be classed dependent. The model aims to reduces the overall proportion of students who are misclassified while also ensuring balance in misclassification for both the independent and dependent categories separately. It should be noted that statistical tests suggest misclassification may be as high as 24% for either category. Therefore, caution should be used when interpreting the analysis which classifies those who did not receive SUSI support as either independent or dependent.
Information on student home address and Eircode is obtained by linking student records with Census 2016. The Eircode records are for Census night 2016 only and may not reflect the Eircode SUSI would use to determine adjacency. Limitations in Eircode availability mean that not all students without SUSI support could be assigned an adjacency status. For this report of the 215,923 new entrants to either a general or honours degree in the period 2012 – 2017, 11,213 (5%) could not be assigned as either adjacent or non-adjacent.
The method used to estimate adjacency for those not in receipt of SUSI support differs in two ways to the official SUSI method. Firstly, to adhere to CSO confidentiality policy, the distance between the college and the student's Small Area and not exact location is calculated. Secondly, the straight-line distance is calculated which differs from the SUSI method which uses third party software and incorporates the road network. The straight-line distance is systematically lower than the SUSI method and is adjusted upwards using a transformation so that bigger adjustments are made for larger distances. Statistical tests suggest misclassification may be as high as 7% for those assigned adjacency using this method.
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Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (27 September 2024) published Education and Other Outcomes for SUSI Support Recipients 2012-2022.
This new release analyses the outcomes of students and learners who received financial support from Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) in higher and further education using administrative and Census data. This is a joint release between the CSO and SUSI.
Commenting on the release, Tadgh Hegarty, Statistician in the Statistical Systems Coordination Unit, said: “Throughout this joint release, the CSO provided statistical capability to help inform SUSI’s analysis of student grant funding. The CSO’s statistical capability support will help accelerate SUSI’s analysis and further advance the use of data as a national resource in line with the CSO’s mandate to provide evidence and insight to inform decision making across all parts of Irish society.
This new release measures the education and employment outcomes for recipients of SUSI support in further and higher education. In addition, using exploratory methods, students who did not receive financial support are classified in terms of the factors SUSI consider when determining grant rates. As part of the Frontier Series, it must be emphasised that estimates from this release should be interpreted with caution as it uses new methods which are under development.
Main Results
Overall, our analysis shows that more than 45% of new entrants to honours degrees (NFQ Level 8) received maintenance or fee support from SUSI while the figure for general degrees (NFQ Level 7) was 62%. For honours degree students under the age of 23, fewer students in receipt of a SUSI support completed their degree than those who did not receive a SUSI support. The data show that 79% of those who received support completed their degree compared with 86% of those who did not receive a SUSI support.
In terms of mature honours degree students (aged 23 and over), the opposite was true. Some 71% who received a SUSI support completed their degree compared with 65% of those who did not receive SUSI support. Notably, some 70% of mature general degree students who received SUSI support completed their degree compared with 59% of those without maintenance or fee support.
Looking at learners who undertook PLC courses, a ‘Major award with distinction' was achieved by 36% of learners who received a SUSI support. Furthermore, more than 81% of PLC learners who received SUSI support and 74% of those without support achieved an educational award.”
Further commenting on development of this new release, Robert Kelly, Senior Statistician, said: “This release was produced using a statistical framework known as the 'Educational Longitudinal Database' (ELD) developed by the CSO. This framework is produced by matching datasets from the Education sector to other public sector datasets which describe learner outcomes in subsequent years. In this regard, the CSO treats all data with strict confidentiality and never discloses any data that could subsequently be associated with any person or business. We have compiled these new statistics using anonymised records and will only produce statistical results at an aggregate level. This means no individual can ever be identified from the data we publish.”