Cathal Barry“Realistic targets” have been set for next year’s enrolment
The new director of Trinity College Dublin’s Loyola Institute has insisted she is confident about the future of the institute despite the low numbers of students currently registered.
The Loyola Institute began enrolling students on degree courses in 2013 and currently has 15 full-time students.
Prof. Siobhan Garrigan, Loyola Professor of Catholic Theology, however, said the number of students currently enrolled at the college was “very encouraging”.
“I am very pleased with them. People are taking a chance with us as nobody has gone through this system before. For an institute that is still very much in its infancy, 15 is actually a really healthy number,” she told The Irish Catholic.
A spokeswoman for TCD said the institute “expects to enroll a further 15 students for undergraduate degrees in September 2015, plus up to twenty in the first intake of our forthcoming post-graduate offerings”.
Target
Prof. Garrigan said the expectation of enrolling at least 15 students each year was a “realistic target” for the new institute.
She noted that post-graduate students applying for courses would further boost enrolment figures, but could not confirm when such programmes would be available.
“We haven’t confirmed that just yet but we are hoping for next September,” she said.
The former Yale University lecturer dismissed concerns that the new institute would be subsumed into TCD unless there was a major upswing in student numbers.
“Trinity College has been very supportive of us so far and we have hit all our targets to date. It may be something to worry about in the future but at the moment it’s not a concern,” Prof. Garrigan said.
She claimed the quality of the institute’s current students, as well as the level of interest the institute hadreceived from prospective students, were all indications of its future viability.
The Loyola Institute is an academic unit within the Confederal School for Religions, Peace Studies and Theology at TCD and offers teaching and research in all aspects of theology in the Catholic tradition.