How are community ratings decided?

Who decides community ratings?

Are NC's consulted about community ratings?

In the last two years, the numer of Architecture Schools in Ireland has doubled from 3 to 6. The original 3 being: University College Dublin, Dublin Institute of Tech, Queens University Belfast. The new 3 colleges being University of Limerick, Waterford Institute of Tech and University of Ulster.

Demand for places in Ireland has significantly increased. Ireland has probably the busiest construction industry in Europe - existing colleges have even expanded, This means that in the space of 5 years (the last two and the next three) the number of arch. students in Ireland will double. Interest in EASA has increased here exponentially, I have had queries from 12 people already ( and it is February!) with a quota of 5, I don't think that I need to explain my position.

Last year we had 7 places, all filled at Bergun. Why has our quota gone down when the overall no. of EASA places remained the same?

I ask this question in the context of EASA Ireland considering bidding for EASA in 2008/2009. How can I mobilise people for this when none of them know what EASA is?

As taken from the EASA Guide: "Community: ranging from 1 to 6, it tells about the number of schools and students in each country"

The problem for me as Irish NC is that the commnity ratings allocated make no sense, we have 6 collges but only a rating of 1, if we had a rating of 2, we would have a quota of seven, if we had a rating of 3, which is probably correct, we would have a quota of 9.

I don't think many of the ratings allocated make sense, why does France have a rating of 4, when it has 25+ colleges, and Denmark has a rating of 3 when it has two, albeit large, colleges.

Feel free to correct me if what I'm saying makes no sense.

I feel that the quotas should be completely recalculated.