The chairman of the Higher Education Authority has suggested that a "counter flow" of Northern Ireland students coming to the Republic may be emerging as student fees in the UK make it less attractive for Southern students to go to Britain or the North.
Dr Don Thornhill was speaking at a conference in Belfast in response to a paper on participation in higher education in the North.
He referred to a leaked report from the Points Commission which said that nearly 43 per cent of places in the TCD medical school last year went to students with GCE A-levels.
Some 13 per cent of places on the main "high points" healthcare courses in the Republic's universities - medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy and physiotherapy - went to students with GCE A-levels. Of these, more than two-thirds had sat their A-levels in the North.
Dr Thornhill wondered if there were echoes of the debate in Northern Ireland in the early 1990s about whether growing numbers of students from the Republic at Northern third-level institutions were "displacing" Northern students.
The HEA chairman also noted that the number of students from the Republic applying to UK universities and colleges through the British UCAS system had been falling in recent years: from 9,298 applicants and 3,878 acceptances in 1997, to 6,448 applicants and 2,908 acceptances last year, to 5,361 applications this year.
In his paper on higher education participation in the North, Prof Robert Osborne of the University of Ulster noted that at his university, the most popular among Southern students, the number of undergraduate entrants from the Republic peaked at 17 per cent in 1994-95, but had fallen back to 10 per cent by 1997-98.
He said entrants from the Repu blic last year represented about 4 per cent of total Northern Ireland higher education entrants. He said on the basis of these figures it was hard to argue there was a "general displacement" of Northern students by those from the Republic.
However, he also said "the supply of well-qualified - in terms of Leaving Certificate results - entrants from the South" had enabled Northern universities to keep the A level grades they demanded from their Northern applicants relatively high.
Dr Osborne also noted survey evidence suggesting that students from the higher social classes were more likely to go to Britain. He said that in 1997-98, 33.6 per cent of Northern Irish entrants to full-time undergraduate courses went to Britain or the Republic to study. Of these, 93.5 per cent went to Britain.
In the same year 57.5 per cent of first year full-time undergraduates at Queen's University Belfast were Catholic. At the University of Ulster 56.1 per cent of all students, including part-timers and postgraduates, were Catholic, 39.9 per cent were Protestant, and four 4 per cent "other".