Danish sector leaders have condemned government plans to cut almost 3,000 undergraduate places across the country’s eight universities, warning of potential labour shortages and impacts on student mental health due to increased competition.
In April, the Ministry of Higher Education and Science announced that universities must reduce their annual intake by approximately 10 per cent between 2025 and 2029. Institution-specific targets, ranging from 6.5 per cent for the Technical University of Denmark to 14.1 per cent for Roskilde University, were calculated using factors including graduate unemployment rates and the countrywide distribution of programmes.
The announcement follows a settlement agreed last June, in which the government pledged to reduce bachelor’s admissions by 8 per cent in order to create a “better balance” between academic and vocational education. The reforms would encourage more students to pursue careers such as teaching, social work and nursing, the Ministry of Higher Education said. A third of master’s degrees, meanwhile, are set to be restructured or shortened.
The master’s reforms also include an increase in English-language places, aimed at attracting international students to subject areas in high demand from the Danish business sector. In February, the government announced the initial distribution among the universities of 1,100 additional places on English-language master’s degree programmes. The eight universities will be permitted to create a total of 1,100 new English-language places per year between 2024 and 2028, with the figure rising to 2,500 per year from 2029.
Speaking to the Danish newspaper Politiken, education minister Christina Egelund said the cuts to bachelor’s programmes would not be necessary “in an ideal world”, but were required to address the “dramatic decline” in welfare-related enrolments.
Jesper Langergaard, director of Universities Denmark, told Times Higher Education that the loss of 2,654 undergraduate places between 2025 and 2029 could “escalate competition for admission to the universities” if the demand for academic education does not decline.
“We have already seen an increase in stress and mental health issues among young people, so we may expect this problem to become bigger in the future,” Mr Langergaard said.
“The demand for academics across both public and private employers is very high right now. If this tendency continues, these cuts mean that the universities will not be able to meet the demand for academic labour.”
Calling the cuts “an experiment”, Mr Langergaard said it was not possible to predict whether they would achieve their stated goal of redirecting students towards professional education.
Brian Bech Nielsen, rector of Aarhus University, said the cuts, along with the reform of the country’s master’s programmes, “will mean less academics in the Danish workforce, and a subsequent drop in productivity”. His institution will be required to reduce undergraduate admissions by 9.5 per cent, or 545 places.
“With regards to the criteria [used to determine university-specific cuts], I think it is problematic that the needs of the labour market are viewed only in retrospect through historic graduate unemployment numbers,” Professor Bech Nielsen said. “I would argue that we need to look ahead at what our society and our employers might need in the future, and not what they have needed in the past.”
“I acknowledge that the aim of the government is to have more of our young people apply to vocational programmes like nursing or teaching,” the rector added, “but current data suggests that only very few of our applicants will be inclined to look in that direction if they are turned down by us.”
