CBS: No extra student places in the 2010 budget proposal

The Danish government invests in buildings at the expense of student places

Approx DKK 1 billion for new buildings, but only DKK 100 million for students. That is the essence of the government’s 2010 budget proposal, which was presented on Tuesday 25 August.

President of Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Johan Roos is surprised by the prioritisation between buildings and student places.

No “hollowing out” of education programmes

The yearly DKK 100 million will be spent on boosting the government education funding for social sciences and humanities, which means that the educational institutions get approx DKK 2,000 extra per student p.a.

- The proposal in its current form entails that CBS gets just under DKK 20 million extra in value added funding. Of course, it is a welcome addition and it will make it possible to avoid a continued “hollowing out” of the education programmes, Johan Roos says.

- But, unfortunately, we will not be able to create extra student places. And we need those extra student places, don’t we? This year, we had to reject just under 3,000 applicants, and we have to draw the line when it takes a grade point average higher than 10 to be accepted into some of the CBS programmes.

More student places in social sciences and humanities

The past couple of days, the value added funding scheme has been met with opposition in the media, and focus has been on the demand for a higher intake on the social sciences and humanities programmes.

- Earlier on, we increased the number of student places without increased value added funding, but we cannot continue to do so without affecting programme quality. We appreciate the DKK 20 million, but with DKK 100 million, for instance, we would be able to create a significant number of extra student places over a number of years, give the students more lessons and get more professors in the lecture rooms, University Director Peter Pietras says.