Points for architecture courses are collapsing, while nursing is in rude health. Do students regret picking a course that the recession has made unpopular?

THERE WERE tectonic shifts on Planet CAO this year. Sacred courses such as law and architecture fell out of favour while previously unassuming programmes in science and nursing surged. Many Leaving Cert students followed their heads rather than their hearts and shied away from career areas that have cooled in the recession.

The class of 2009 deserted any course that had even a passing association with property. Architecture, law, civil engineering and quantity surveying all saw considerable points reductions for the first time in years.

At the University of Limerick, architecture dropped by 30 points to 460. In UCD, civil engineering dipped 60 to 410 points. Construction management at DIT has fallen by 55 points to 305.

Even law, a prestige course that has risen above the vagaries of the CAO for decades, dropped by 30 points in UCD to 470. There was a 10 per cent fall in demand for places on law courses countrywide.

Conor Mulcrone is about to embark on a degree course in property economics at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He is aware that he’s bucking the trend but it doesn’t bother him. “Most leading economists predict a recovery for Ireland by 2013,” he says. “That’s about right for me, I reckon. My mother is a property consultant who studied property economics during the last recession. She left Ireland to get work after graduation but eventually came back and set up a very successful business here.”

A number of Mulcrone’s contemporaries pulled away from property economic in favour of more general courses, such as Business Economics and Social Science at Trinity College Dublin, but he wasn’t tempted.

“I’m more interested in this course and that’s my main motivation. I spent 10 weeks working in a property consultancy during transition year and I found the whole area fascinating. I think it would be madness to choose a course I’m less interested in because there’s a recession on now. Every sector is touched by the recession and it won’t last forever.”

Architecture is a holy-grail career for thousands of Irish students; the chance to combine creativity with science and make a buck in the process is very alluring.

However, this year, architecture was one of the hardest-hit courses on the CAO line-up, dropping by more than 30 points in some colleges. Some commentators are reporting up to 50 per cent unemployment among Ireland’s architects.

It’s a stark figure when you consider that these are some of Ireland’s highest academic achievers; architecture came in at a daunting 525 points in UCD last year.

The programme itself is more demanding than most – at 22 hours contact time, architecture students work the equivalent of a working week when project work is factored in. It’s a scary prospect to think that such commitment could lead to the dole queue.

It hasn’t put Erannan Bent off the prospect, although he did waver. “I looked far and wide for other career ideas before settling on architecture,” says Bent, who is about to kick off his studies in Waterford Institute of Technology next week. “Initially, I considered other options because my father is an architect, and I didn’t want to follow him blindly into a career. Then when architects started losing their jobs all over the place, it seemed sensible to look around.”

However, Bent’s personal interest in the craft brought him back to architecture and he has no regrets.

“I was born in Finland and I have no fear of travelling,” he says. “If I have no luck getting work here, I’ll head off and gather knowledge abroad. If I can’t get work as an architect, I’ll try something else for a while. My dad says that architecture is the mother of all design. It’s not a cul-de-sac.

“There are many other roads that I can take after I graduate and in the meantime I will enjoy the course.”

Bent’s head of school at WIT, Maire Henry, commends his resolve. “This is actually the right time to begin an architecture programme,” she says. “In five years we’ll have a shortage.”

Aoife Mulligan will be leaving her hometown of Waterford in a few weeks to take up a law degree in Griffith College Dublin. She did not expect to get a place in law, but a reasonable points tally of 350 put her into the frame.

“I’m not too worried about the future,” she says. “I’m only 19 now. I’ll be 22 when I graduate and then I’ll probably go to King’s Inns for another year. That’s ages away. Who knows what will be going on in the economy by then?”

Mulligan has quite specific plans for her law degree, which is not as vulnerable to the ebb and flow of economics as some other career paths. “When I was in transition year I did a work placement with the Garda Síochána,” she says.

“It gave me an interest in the whole area of criminology. One day I would like to apply for the Garda, but not as a garda on the beat. I want to enter at a different level, with a law degree under my belt, and a chance to work in the area that interests me. I’m not going into law for property conveyancing.”

Ironically, Mulligan’s first choice was disability nursing, which had lower points last year. She felt sure she would get nursing far more easily than law. However, there was a dramatic rise in points for the programme this year, with an average increase of 40 points across the 13 colleges offering nursing. In Dundalk alone, the course rose by a whopping 50 points, ruling out many people, including Mulligan.

“I never really visualised myself in Dublin studying law, but I don’t regret it,” says Mulligan. “Lawyers end up in all sorts of interesting places, from law enforcement to teaching to politics, so who knows where this might take me?”