COLUMN: Rector: "We’re facing tough decisions"
Like all universities in Denmark, Aarhus University will have to educate fewer young people from 2025. This is a result of the political agreement behind the Master’s reform. AU must reduce its admissions by 545 student places, and 200 of its existing places must be converted to new ones. The senior management team has just decided how the reductions will be distributed across the faculties. Now the faculties have to decide how they will implement these enrolment caps at degree programme level. This is neither an easy nor an enviable task, writes Brian Bech Nielsen in this month’s column by the senior management team.
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First and foremost, I hope that you all had a good summer holiday, and that you were able to relax and recharge. Soon campus will once again be brimming with new students, full of curiosity and a passion for life and learning. Their enthusiasm is contagious – and a good job too, because it reminds us all what an inspiring place the university is. We’ll need to hold onto this thought as we encounter the challenging times ahead – because, as a university, we are now facing a considerable and unenviable task.
As you know, last year, the Danish Parliament reached an agreement on a university reform that involves introducing new, shorter Master’s degree programmes, more Master’s degree programmes for working professionals, and sector resizing. For Aarhus University, this means reducing net admissions to the university’s academic Bachelor’s programmes by 545 student places compared with average admissions between 2018 and 2022. On 15 August, we announced how this reduction would be distributed across the faculties.
One of the political motivations behind the sector resizing is to try to encourage more young people to take short and medium-cycle higher education programmes, which have seen declining enrolment figures in recent years.
Our appraoch to sector resizing
Now it gets a bit technical, but I think it’s important to explain how the senior management team has approached the implementation of sector resizing, which has been a demanding task for us. As a result of sector resizing, universities in Denmark will have to cap their Bachelor’s admissions from 2025 onwards. Admissions to Aarhus University will be capped at 5,191 student places. This is 545 fewer student places than average admissions between 2018 and 2022 (and 346 fewer than in 2023).
These 545 places represent our net admissions reduction. But, in addition to this, we need to create 200 new student places in connection with a different political agreement, the relocation agreement, which was concluded in 2022. These places need to be found within the new admissions limit, so, in reality, our existing Bachelor’s degree programmes will have to be cut by a further 200 places.
The parameters we used
The political agreement specifies a number of parameters to take into account when deciding how enrolment caps should be distributed across faculties. One of the main parameters is graduate unemployment rates, so we have weighted this at 50 per cent in our distribution of the 545 places to be cut.
Another parameter is the overall effect that sector resizing and converting Master’s programmes will have on the affected degree programmes. We have also weighted this parameter at 50 per cent, so that the faculties’ relative loss of revenue from educational activities is the same – compared with 2023.
This leaves the 200 new places, which we see as a joint responsibility to provide. This means that the faculties who receive the new places must also contribute to finding them. We have decided that each faculty should contribute equally to half of the places to be cut, and that the other half should be divided among the faculties based on the number of student FTEs produced per faculty in 2023.
I hope that this gives you an insight into the parameters we used when deciding where enrolment cuts should be made. In our calculations, we have endeavoured to balance the many different considerations mentioned in the political agreement. If you are interested, you can find more information and technical details about the distribution of cuts here.
A difficult task awaits
Even after the sector resizing process, Aarhus University will remain a comprehensive university and will continue to offer a wide range of degree programmes. Aarhus BSS and Arts will still have the largest student populations by far, while Health, Nat and Tech will remain the faculties with the lowest intake of Bachelor’s students.
But all five faculties now face difficult discussions and decisions. Not only must they determine which Bachelor’s degree programmes to cap; they must also consider which programmes to convert to the new type of Master’s programme. The Master’s degree committee, which I am a member of, will offer its recommendations in October, but the final details will by no means be in place at that point. On the contrary. This will only mark the start of the considerable task that lies ahead of us – that of planning our degree programme landscape of the future. I’m in no doubt that this task will require us all to pull together, support each other and do our utmost to find the best possible solutions within the framework we have.
I’m in no doubt that this task will require us all to pull together, support each other and do our utmost to find the best possible solutions within the framework we have.
This is clearly neither an easy nor an enviable task. But it’s a task we have been given. As a social institution, our main responsibility is now to ensure that we continue to focus on the best way to preserve the high quality of our degree programmes while offering a learning environment in which students can flourish and thrive. We must also be alive to the opportunities the reform presents – such as recruiting and retaining international students and intensifying our efforts within continuing and further education, where we have already launched an initiative in collaboration with the university’s research foundation.
Challenges can also give rise to opportunities. At Aarhus University, we have shown time and time again that we can achieve good results with even the toughest of tasks. I am convinced that, by working together, we can succeed again this time.