How many students from Wales are in Northern Ireland?
8 July 2024
Owain James
Northern Ireland is the theme this week, so I set out to answer: How many students from Wales study in Northern Ireland?
The answer, at least for the 2021/22 academic year, was 160.
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Just over half are at Queen’s University Belfast, and the rest attend Ulster University. This is a small number – comprising around 0.14% of all Welsh students.
Wales sends more people to study in Scotland than Scotland sends to Wales for study, despite having a smaller population. I think this reflects the impact of Scotland’s higher education policy that seeks to retain students in the country for study.
But in the case of Northern Ireland, they send more students to Wales than Wales sends to their universities, despite having a smaller population than Wales. In this case, I think it reflects the relative strength, both in quality and quantity, of higher education providers in Wales.
But while the number of Welsh people studying in Northern Ireland may seem small, it still adds up to a bigger problem.
More than a third of people from Wales leave the country for study, and while there are hot spots outside of Wales where higher rates go (mainly near the border in England), generally they are spread across hundreds of institutions across the UK, and even the world. Often these students are attending high quality institutions as well, such as Queens University Belfast, a Russell Group university.
If we want to reach them, we will need to innovate. Technology gives us an opportunity to connect across distances in a way that has never been possible, and we will need this if we want to reverse the brain drain and address skills shortages in Wales.
