Every year,
the Sunday Times provides the top-n schools in Ireland. This list is based on the progression rate of each school to the third-level education. As I am more intersted in which universities the students of each school go, e.g., are students in Dublin also going to universities in other cities such as NUI Galway or UCC?, out of curiosity, I have a look over the 2019 data from
schooldays regarding the university places of each school in Dublin area.
As I like heatmap due to huge influence from the tech lead during the previous job, I draw a heatmap where x-axis refers to the main universities in Ireland and y-axis indicates a list of secondary schools in Dublin. And each entry of the heatmap refers to the number of places to a university from a school. In the heatmap, a darker cell indicates a higher number.
In the first version of the heatmap, the first intersting thing catched my attention is the
Institute of Education (IoE), which is an outlier in the heatmap with the highest numbers on university places overall. After digging into some details, I found it was founded in 1969 by Irish school teacher, Raymond Kearns, and is one of the largest
private secondary schools in Ireland with the focus 4th, 5th and 6th year students. To better see overall difference among other schools except the IoE, the following heatmap exclude it for visualization and comparison purposes.
The heatmap tells many intersting things regarding university places.
We notice that students tend to go universities nearby the scool. For instance, the majority of places for Maynooth University come from the Dublin west county and Dublin 15, and those for DCU come from Dublin northside. And as one might expect, many of the places for UCD come from Dublin southside. In line with this obvervation, there is a small number of students going to the universities outside of Dublin such as NUI Galway, UL or UCC:) It seems the location of the university plays an important role while making the decisions.
It is also interesting to notice that the students going to TUD from a wide variety of schools from different zones of Dublin. This might be due to the fact that TUD was formed in 2019 by the amalgamation of three existing institutes of technology in the Dublin area – Dublin Institute of Technology, Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown, and Institute of Technology, Tallaght – which is now the second-largest university in Ireland.
As I am interested in which schools have a higher number places for specific universities such as TCD or UCD, I looked over the places for each university from each school. The
Blackrock College has the highest number of places (with 42 and 99 places) for the two unviersities followed by
St Andrews College. Interstingly, those two colleges are both private (fee-paying) ones. However, many public schools such as
Although private education is quite popular in Asian countries such as
South Korea, it is interesting to see
it also quite popular nowadays in Ireland. Do you have your own view or experience on private and public education in Ireland? Share them in the comments:)
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