Committee for Master’s Degree Programmes: Still bumps on the road to the Master’s degree reform

The process of shaping the Master’s degree landscape for coming generations of Danish university students has entered a new phase. It’s now up to the politicians behind the agreement to fix the boundaries on the new educational map, and this week, they received university-sector input on these decisions in the form of the the final report from the Committee for Master’s Degree Programmes, a committee comprised of the rectors of the eight Danish universities, two representatives from the National Union of Students in Denmark along with representatives from Universities Denmark and the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.

According to the rectors’ assessment in the report, the proposed new work-integrated Master’s degree programmes are still the major stumbling block. According to the terms of the reform, 20 per cent of Master’s degree student places at Danish universities must be allocated to flexible new work-integrated Master’s programmes. But according to Brian Bech Nielsen, chair of Universities Denmark and rector of Aarhus University, realising the political ambitions to restructure Master’s degree programmes in the form and on the scale outlined in the agreement will be “extraordinarily difficult”. This is the committee’s argument for their recommendation to adjust the scope and scale of the Master’s reform in their final report to the ministry.

“Our work-integrated Master’s programmes currently have 500 graduates per year, and we are tasked with an almost ten-fold increase. 4,500 students a year will have to choose this track – which means there will have to be 4,500 public and private-sector employers that want to be part of this educational reform. They will have to pay the students a salary for the duration of a four-year programme, while they work 25 hours a week and study part-time. In the report, we present what we believe to be a more attractive and flexible model for work-integrated Master’s programmes for both students and employers, but it won’t generate the macroeconomic benefits for society the reform demands,” Bech Nielsen explains.

“The political agreement stipulates very specific targets for the effect of the reform on the labour supply, and establishes narrow parameters for the duration of the degree programmes and student employment requirements. At the same time, business and industry have expressed scepticism about whether employers would be able to commit to four-year programmes. So at the end of the day, we haven’t been able to come up with a model that we believe would be attractive for students and employers and that could realistically be rolled out to 20 percent of our student places,” he concludes.

Can mean significantly more graduates of shorter Master’s degree programmes

To the extent that the universities are unable to convert existing traditional Master’s student places to work-integrated Master’s degree programmes, they will have to offer shorter Master’s degree programmes to make up the difference.

“According to our estimates, we could realistically reach a maximum of about 7 per cent graduates of work-integrated Master’s programmes. This means that 23 per cent of future Master’s degree students will have to take a short Master’s degree qualification, as opposed to the 10 per cent-target set by the politicians in the agreement,” Bech Nielsen points out.

He explains that the universities fundamentally support the ambition to foster closer ties between higher education and the labour market, and that they’ve proposed a different model for work-integrated Master’s programmes that corresponds to a two-year programme taken over three years.

And in relation to the reform’s target of having 10 percent of future students graduate from shorter 75-ECTS Master’s programmes, the rectors of the country’s universities believe that they will be able to deliver.

“It’s no easy task, but it’s one we believe we can manage in a good, responsible way for coming students,” Bech Nielsen says.

• Read more about the rectors’ recommendations in their joint statement in the report from the Committee for Master’s Degree Programmes (in Danish; the statement is at the end of the report PDF)
• Read the rectors’ opinion piece in Altinget (in Danish)

What happens next?

As explained above, it’s now up to the political parties behind the agreement to negotiate a solution, based on the committee’s input and - not least - the challenges identified in the report. Only after this political process will the universities have a clear picture of how many Master’s degree programmes they will have to convert, and how many of these are to be converted to shorter 75-ECTS programmes or work-integrated Master’s degree programmes.

The new programmes must be open for enrolments from 2028, which means the outcome of these negotiations will also have a decisive influence on what Bachelor’s programmes will be offered from 2025. In preparation for this, in recent months the senior management team and the faculty leadership teams have begun working on strategic scenarios for the implementation of the coming reform. This has been necessary due to the tight schedule for the reform, the rector explains:

“Obviously, it’s hard to connect the dots when you don’t know where they are. To have any hope at all of giving coming applicants an overview of the educational trajectories that are available to them, we’ve had to do the best we can based on the very general principles we’ve been given in the political agreement. That’s the most responsible course of action, and our faculties have taken this task on and are approaching it constructively. That’s commendable, because we’re dealing with difficult discussions and a difficult task.”

In connection with this process of preparing for the implementation of the Master’s reform, the deans from Denmark’s universities are working together on scenarios for changes in the range of degree programmes offered in the different subjects. The deans’ work bears no relationship to the scenarios outlined in Chapter 3 of the committee’s report.

The Master’s reform at AU: Where we are now

The implementation of the Master’s degree reform at AU, including the previously announced sector resizing, affects the faculties in different ways. On this background, they have taken different approaches to the process. This is an overview of what the faculties have announced so far:

• Health has decided how the sector resizing (capping enrolments) will be implemented and is currently considering which Master’s degree programmes can be redesigned and how. Read more
• Aarhus BSS has planned the sector resizing (capping enrolments) process and has discussed the principles for the redesign of Master’s degree programmes. Read more
• Arts has decided on how enrolment caps are to be allocated across degree programmes and is in the process of planning the redesign of Master’s degree programmes. Read more
• Technical Sciences will not introduce caps on enrolments in 2025 due to the new student places allocated to AU Viborg, which are not yet filled up. However, from 2026 a potentially significant reduction in enrolments to the MSc Engineering programme may be on the table. The faculty is planning on converting 15 per cent of traditional MSC Engineering student places to work-integrated places.
• Natural Sciences has announced how the caps on enrolments will be implemented across the faculty’s degree programmes. The faculty is approach centres on developing new, targeted 75-ECTS programmes and to a lesser degree shorter, focused versions of existing degree programmes. Read more