In December of 2018 Dunboyne College received confirmation from LMETB, Solas, and the Department of Education that the college will have the teaching resources to reach 1000 students from next year.
This coupled with the fact that work on identifying a new site for the development of the new campus is well advanced means that the only college of further education in County Meath can develop even more new programmes to add to its existing 44 courses, as well as developing new traineeships, apprenticeships and HND qualifications into the future.
The college serves Meath, west Dublin and north Kildare but students are currently coming from other parts of Leinster as well.
University offers
The progression opportunities to third level from Dunboyne College are significant and this past summer 241 of our graduates received honours degree Level 8 offers and 208 received Level 7 ordinary degree offers.
As usual some of our local universities had the bulk of the offer especially Maynooth University five miles away with 85 offers including 49 for Arts as well as multiple offers for Social Science, Science and Business and Law.
There were also numerous offers to other universities including 22 to DCU, 14 to UCD, 8 to Trinity College, 8 to NCI, and 68 to DIT. It was similar story for I.T. colleges around the country with I.T. Blanchardstown leading the way with 126 offers in Business, Creative Media, Sports Management and Coaching, or Early Childhood Care and Education. In fact there were over 200 offers in total for the new TU Dublin.
Ideal way
One year QQI level 5 Programmes like the majority run in Dunboyne are an ideal way to pursue a course in an area of interest and access to third level option.
By having a day a week in a work experience setting, it allows students to see if they are pursuing the correct option before embarking on a four year degree course or entering a career.
Students often do far better at further education level as they are now studying in an area of their passion and aptitude like nursing, sports, childcare, science or cookery rather than in the Leaving Cert where Irish, English and Maths etc. were compulsory.
Increasing in popularity
As students also learn referencing, research and self-directed learning they tend to stay the full third level course afterwards, unlike many who go straight from Leaving Cert who are often not very sure of their options.
Dropout rates for students who do a level 5 QQI course are less than 3% on progression compared to 10% at university level up to 20% on some courses for leaving cert entrants to IT colleges.
Dunboyne courses are increasing in popularity with this year over 2100 students applying for 800 places for 2018 entry.
