The Global Relations Office is set to meet its targets for enrolment of non-EU students after concern was expressed by the Finance Committee in June.
In a meeting of the Finance Committee on June 8th, 2015, the committee expressed “concern at the reducing level of acceptances for 2015/16 in relation to the level of offers of student places and requested the [College] Planning Group to consider this as a matter of urgency”.
This fear however has proved to be unwarranted. The Vice President for Global Relations, Dr Juliette Hussey said that this was due to unclear timeframes of stages of the application process and that “the full picture was not known in June”.
Hussey emphasised that many international students apply to a variety of universities all over the world which have different dates for offers, acceptance deadlines and registration deadlines and this could have caused late acceptance of offers to Trinity. Adding that this issue was being looked at under the Academic Registry Enhancement Programme she said: “We want to work with the Global Officers in terms of reducing the time that students would wait between the application and the decision so that if they get a positive decision early that that could translate into an acceptance of the place”.
While the targets for international students are set to be reached, the number of research postgraduate students will be higher than expected and the number of taught postgraduate students has not reached the projected estimates.
However, it is unlikely that this picture will be complete before the end of term as not all students are registered at this stage. The Global Relations Office report regularly to the Planning Group and numbers are monitored closely.
One of the aims of Trinity’s 2014-2019 strategic plan is to increase the proportion of non-EU students from 7.8 per cent in 2012 to 18 per cent in 2019, which would mean approximately 3000 international students in Trinity by 2019.
The purpose of the Global Relations Office is to promote Trinity abroad. Teams are sent to student recruitment fairs, alumni scattered abroad act as ambassadors to the college and online promotion is used. Most of the efforts of the Global Relations Office are focused on recruiting students for courses like engineering and computer science, which have higher recruitment targets, due to their high international demand.
The Global Relations Office works with faculties and schools to determine where increases in the intake of overseas students can be made. These increases, however, do not apply to all courses due to certain restrictions in capacity, particularly in courses with practical components.
Hussey cited the fact that Trinity students come from 122 countries as an example of its “geographical diversity”, with the key markets for student recruitment being the USA, India and China.
Emphasising the importance of globalisation for Trinity, she stated: “To be a global university, we want Irish students to be sitting beside students from all over the world”, adding: “it’s very important that there is that diversity and that we’re not just looking at one or two different areas”.
