Comments on the draft of SDU’s institutional plan regarding regionalisation
In the coming days and weeks, SDU will involve several of the University’s bodies in the regionalisation proposal which SDU has been asked to submit to the Ministry of Higher Education and Science at the turn of the year.
In June, the political agreement ‘more and better educational opportunities in Denmark’ was entered into, due to a political desire to offer more educational opportunities outside the country’s largest cities. Because of the agreement, SDU has been asked to prepare an institutional plan that reduces up to 10% of the student places in Odense by 2030, either by relocating them to other cities or by eliminating them completely.
SDU is well equipped for that task, as the University is already highly regionally anchored with campuses in five cities. Thus, SDU has the opportunity to relocate student places rather than eliminating them.
In fact, more than 20% of SDU’s students study at the campuses outside Odense. This means SDU already meets the requirements of the political agreement on significant regionalisation in the education sector.
The University will therefore strongly argue that the reduction should be less than 10% for SDU and closer to the 5% set as the lower limit in the political agreement.
An involving process is crucial
Work on an institutional plan for how SDU intends to meet the reduction requirement in Odense is well underway. By 31 December at the latest, the Ministry of Higher Education and Science must receive the plan, which the Board of Directors will decide upon on 10 December.
The Main Liaison Committee, the University Council and the student organisation Students in Focus have been given an overall status of the Executive Board’s work with the plan, and these councils will be convened again on 29-30 November to comment on the draft institutional plan before submitting the draft to the Board for consideration on 10 December.
In addition, the academic councils and liaison committees of the faculties are involved between 22-26 November. The deans will present their faculty’s draft reductions and relocations, and the local collegiate bodies will thus have the opportunity to comment on the draft plan for each faculty.
The content of the plan will follow after the board meeting
For SDU’s Executive Board, it is important and crucial that the University maintains its profile as a multi-faculty university with campuses that must also have even stronger and clearer profiles.
The Board has decided that the three criteria unemployment, quality of education and strategic considerations must be used to assess where to make the reductions and/or set up new student places outside Odense. SDU’s Executive Board expects to be able to publish the specific plan in mid-December, following the board meeting on 10 December.
SDU’s institutional plan is expected to be included in an overall sectoral plan for the eight universities, which will be submitted for approval to the Minister for Higher Education and Science and the political conciliation parties during the first quarter of 2022. After the political approval of the sectoral plan in the middle of spring 2022, SDU will know the final institutional plan and sectoral plan for the universities until 2030.
Ongoing informationSDU’s Executive Board has continuously supplied information about the work of implementing the political agreement on ‘more and better educational opportunities in Denmark’:
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