GIS and its potential for UCD

By Assoc Professor Gerald Mills, Head of School, School of Geography. 

A great deal of information that UCD gathers contains valuable geographic information that is rarely used for planning purposes. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) describe software that is capable of analysing the spatial patterns present in data alongside traditional statistical analysis.

A good example of how GIS could be used is in the examination of the school origins of students at UCD.

The great majority of students that come to Belfield for the first time in September 2017 will be drawn from the Irish school system and most will have completed their leaving certificate (LC) in one of over 700 secondary schools that are managed by the Dept. of Education and Skills. The DoES maintains a database of these schools which identifies each with a unique roll number and has information on the total number of students, the full address, etc. There are a few other schools (e.g. the Institute of Education in Dublin) that are not included in this database.  Address-matching software can be used to convert these data into a location (a x,y co-ordinate) and GIS can map these.  The information gathered by UCD when students apply for a programme also includes the name of the school where they completed their LC, so these can be matched with the DoES database.

The map to the right shows the number of applicants for the BA programme in 2016 (5453). The distinct pattern that emerges can be explained by a number of factors including physical proximity, school size, transport options, socio-economic opportunities and historic links to certain institutions; of course all of these factors are correlated. For example, more than one-fifth of BA applications come from schools within 5km of Belfield and distant schools are usually along the coast where there are public transport routes (see Table). In the same vein, there were no applications from Tallaght Community School, which has 750 students and is only 8km away.

It is a simple matter in GIS to combine these data with other information (census information, transport routes, etc.) to think strategically about increasing the geographical (and socio-economic) reach of UCD. Moreover, such analysis could provide a basis for developing substantive links with schools based on existing strengths and opportunities. Other UCD could be combined to ask specific questions, for example: where are UCD alumni teachers? and which schools produce Law students?

Here I have focused on student applications, which reveals the extraordinary reliance of the largest university programme in the country on relatively few schools. However, the potential for a geographic approach to the management and analysis of university information (e.g. transport planning and alumni relations) is considerable.