The Executive Board is discussing a plan for regionalisation of education with the ministry
During the autumn, the universities must submit plans for regionalisation of education. For the Executive Board, this currently means that they are in close dialogue with the ministry.
Dear staff
First of all, I would like to seize the opportunity to welcome Jens Ringsmose, who will take over as the new Rector of SDU. Jens has been a member of the Executive Board for two years, and he and I began as deans at about the same time.
I can concur with the headlines from the press releases, where Jens is mentioned as a visionary leader who works hard for the entire SDU. We have already strengthened the collaboration with his faculty in his short time as dean.
It is worth mentioning initiatives in the field of digital democracy in which the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science is also involved. It is my opinion that Jens is passionate about establishing collaborations across SDU and will continue to develop SDU regionally, nationally and internationally.
A large part of the time in the Executive Board is currently spent working on the regionalisation of education. We have many dialogues with the ministry about the interpretation of data, as the devil often lies in the detail.
At the same time, we are working with arguments for SDU to reduce by less than 10 per cent. Here, SDU’s presence in the entire region with 21 per cent of the seats located outside Odense is an important argument.
It is expected that graduate unemployment will play a significant role in the dimensioning. Unfortunately, our faculty is challenged in several Master's degree programmes with high graduate unemployment.
The biggest challenge for the entire sector, however, is that enrollment at universities will in future be maintained at the level in 2019. It will thus not be possible to increase the number of students on bachelor's and master's degree programmes if the current education policy is maintained.
At our faculty, we have a cautious approach to growth, as we partly have several unemployment-dimensioned education programmes that cannot grow, and at the same time we have taken into account the demographics, which is expected to develop negatively in the coming years.
However, we have a desire to educate more graduates in the IT field. This is also a focus for the political parties, and we thus hope that it will be possible for us to continue this growth.
A mail should have landed in your inbox with a link to the Workplace Assessment and Well-Being Survey. I would like to encourage you to fill out the questionnaire. The sooner the better. The Workplace Assessment and Well-Being Survey is your opportunity to provide feedback to your department or secretariat about your work environment.
The survey is an incredible help for everyone with management responsibilities and for the work environment representatives at the faculty. By getting your feedback, we can work much more purposefully to ensure a continued good working environment and improve it where it is difficult.