By Lea Laursen Pasgaard, AAU Communication and Public Affairs
Photos: Anders Fast Nielsen

"The report is published, and we hope for some good political discussions on the reform, but we don’t know how things will end up. So what I'm going to tell you now is a very dry and boring story of a dry and boring report. So hang in there."

These were the words of Pro-rector Anne Marie Kanstrup when she opened Tuesday's Q&A on the recently published final report by the national committee on the reform of the Master’s programmes. She reviewed the report's main conclusions, outlined the main lines of further action and answered staff questions.

The pro-rector made no secret of the fact that it has been 'very difficult' to fulfil the political ambitions of the Master's reform, and that there are still some major 'kinks' in the reform that the national committee has not been able to agree on.

"Some of the disagreements are very practical. Like about what title you get when you finish a short Master's degree in one and a quarter years. Other disagreements are more complex," said the pro-rector.

Master's degree for working professionals the biggest sticking point

According to the pro-rector, the major sticking point in the Master's reform centres on the 'new, flexible Master's degree for working professionals'.

The parties supporting the Master's reform want to convert 30 percent of the country's Master's programmes – 20 percent to Master's programmes for working professionals and 10 percent to short Master's programmes of one and a quarter years. However, the national committee did not succeed – within the given financial framework – in reaching agreement on a model for a new flexible Master's degree for working professionals.

"If you read the text, you will see that many of the concerns about the Master's degree for working professionals are about whether it is realistic at all," explains the pro-rector.

The attitude among the universities is that the workload in the new Master's degree for working professionals will be too high, and that the programmes will therefore not attract students. At the same time, there is concern about whether it is even possible to provide jobs for all the students who politicians want to do a professionally oriented Master's programme. A job is a requirement for admission to a Master's degree programme for working professionals.

The rectors therefore predict that the universities will have to convert a significantly larger proportion of the Master's programmes to short Master's programmes, because the 30 percent conversion is fixed.

See also: Statement from Universities Denmark on the national committee's final report (in Danish)

Huge planning task

Among other major sticking points, the pro-rector also mentioned the extensive planning that it will require to offer the new degree programmes. The Master's reform provides for programmes of several different lengths. Some as full-time programmes, others as part-time programmes and all Master's programmes must also be shortened by one month.

"This will mean that some students will have to start their studies in August and others in September. Some students will take exams in May and others in June and August. And then there are re-exams that will also need to take place, and so on. I usually say that we will be like a 7-Eleven that is open all the time. It will be a huge organizational task that will challenge us as to how we use our resources in the best way," said the pro-rector.

"This also means that at some point we will need to have some discussions about what AAU’s programme portfolio will look like. How many programmes can we keep running at the same time?" she added.

In her 'reading guide' for the report, the pro-rector emphasized that the most important reading is the rectors' statement on the content that can be found at the very end of the report in an appendix. Here, the politicians encourage reopening the reform, and at the same time propose solutions to various elements of the reform.

Questions from attendees

The pro-rector also answered a number of questions from the staff members who attended the Q&A session.

One person wanted to know why AAU should resize 12.1 percent of its Bachelor's programmes as part of the reform, while nationally it is only 10 percent. The pro-rector replied that the distribution took particular account of graduate unemployment, and that AAU must therefore resize more than other universities. However, the pro-rector also emphasized that AAU has resized considerably in previous reforms, and she therefore expects that we can achieve this new resizing smoothly.

Read more about this here: Framework for sector resizing is in place

Another question was how staff members will be involved in the process, to which the pro-rector emphasized that the academic environments at AAU have already been involved in the work. Early in the process, the individual study boards at AAU were asked to submit proposals for which of their degree programmes could be converted to professionally oriented Master's programmes and short Master's programmes, respectively.

These inputs were included in the first rough outline for AAU's restructuring of Master's programmes. The rough outline was submitted to the ministry in February and input from this was included in the national committee’s first interim report. Now that the final report has been published, the rough outline will be discussed again in the Executive Management and also at an extraordinary meeting of the Main Joint Consultation Committee, but so far it is the pro-rector's opinion that the rough outline has not changed significantly.

In their questions, several raised concerns about the students' well-being with the new reform of the Master's programmes. One asked whether the Master's programme reform took into account the increasing number of students who need special pedagogical support and who might find it difficult to complete a Master's degree for working professionals where the workload is higher than 37 hours. To this, the pro-rector replied a dry "no" – and an implied "unfortunately".

Next steps

The parliament’s Higher Education and Research Committee held a public hearing (in Danish) on the report on 28 November, and the universities are awaiting the more detailed political discussions. By the end of January 2025, AAU is expected to submit an institutional plan to the Ministry of Higher Education and Science that describes how many places AAU will convert to Master's programmes for working professionals and short Master's programmes of 75 ECTS, respectively.

Of course, the pro-rector hopes that politicians will listen to the universities' input and review the reform.

"At some point, the reform will be set, and when that happens, it is my ambition that we – whether we like the result or not – go into development mode and create some really great degree programmes for our students, because we can do that, and we owe it to them. But it requires that we know the framework, and we don't have it in place yet," she stated.

Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication and Public Affairs.