New agreement to reduce admissions to all Danish universities
The governing coalition, the Socialist People’s Party, the Denmark Democrats, Liberal Alliance and the Conservative People’s Party have just landed an agreement to reduce admissions to Danish universities in the period 2025-2029. This is the previously announced ‘sector rightsizing’ initiative which was included in the 2023 Master’s reform.
According to the agreement concluded today, admissions to Bachelor’s programmes at Danish universities will be reduced by an average of 10.2 per cent over a baseline of average Bachelor admissions for the period 2018-2022. As a consequence of the agreement, Aarhus University will be required to reduce admissions by 9.5 per cent.
Rector Brian Bech Nielsen has this to say about the new agreement:
“The rationale for the sector-rightsizing initiative is that Danish universities, including Aarhus University, must contribute to the achievement of a different balance in admissions to the different types of higher education programme in the country. Now that we know what the framework is, I and the rest of the senior management team will start discussing how it be implemented across our five faculties. It’s a matter of achieving balance in our total portfolio of academic offerings and between subjects. We will need to get this in place well in advance of next year’s admissions, but right now we’ll focus on thorough consideration of how we can find reasonable solutions within the given framework.
Now that the rightsizing agreement is in place, the universities know what the framework for the three main elements of the Master’s reform is. Agreements on the distribution of the planned reduction in the length and scope of some Master’s and professional Master’s degree programmes by discipline have already been concluded, as well as quotas for international student admissions.
Taken as a whole, this represents sweeping changes to our academic offerings. This will not be an easy task: but naturally, we will shoulder the responsibility, so we will continue to offer high-quality degree programmes to the benefit of the students who embark on their university studies here in coming years, and to the benefit of society in general.”