IT education programmes in Vejle
The faculty is exploring the possibility of opening new IT education programmes in Vejle, in cooperation with the Faculty of Engineering.
Dear staff
In connection with the regionalisation, Vejle Municipality expressed a wish to locate a university in the city with a special focus on IT programmes.
The Ministry of Higher Education and Science (UFM) initiated a investigation of the need for education in the region, which also included an analysis of the demographics among the youth cohorts.
The report was published last week and points to a great need, especially for graduates within the IT and construction fields. The development in the youth cohorts follows the national trends with declining cohorts, but there is a potential to admit students from the region, which has a catchment area similar to the catchment area in Odense.
The mayor of Vejle was very enthusiastic about the report and will now start raising funds for the project. UFM will contribute DKK 19 million to the establishment of education programmes in Vejle.
At SDU, we have been in dialogue with Vejle for a long time and initially the focus was on continuing education in the SDUx project. In our case, we have primarily discussed IT courses.
We are now starting to investigate the possibilities of creating bachelor's and master's degree programmes in IT and Software Engineering together with the Faculty of Engineering. Due to the declining youth cohorts, it will be crucial that international students can be admitted, as otherwise it will be very difficult to get enough volume and thus financially sustainable education programmes.
We focus on IT and software, so that a joint research environment of a certain size can be built across our two faculties. This will ensure synergy between research groups and at the same time support high research coverage and high quality in teaching.
There should be ample opportunity for collaboration on research with companies and public institutions throughout the region, where there is a great demand for research in the IT area.
It is still too early to decide whether it will be possible to find funding and students to establish a university campus in Vejle, but there will be a number of employees who will be involved in the work in the investigation phase.
I would like to wish everyone some nice holidays around coming weekends, now that spring and summer have arrived – almost at the same time.
Marianne Holmer, dean