A Socio-Economic Analysis of Student Population in Third Level Education.

The pursuit of knowledge and the availability of an educational qualification has always been an aspiration of most citizens in developed and less developed economies worldwide. In modern Ireland, the educational system has prided itself as one of the more advanced models vis-a-vis student quality and educational participation structured and quality educational population. Eighty per cent of Irish school children now sit their Leaving Certificate, and there has been a fivefold increase in third level enrolments over the last thirty years. Despite such admirable statistics, large levels of socio-economic depravation still exist in our third level education, so much so that a child of a professional has seven times greater chance of attending third level education than the child of an unskilled manual worker.