Over the bridge from Eurovision host city Malmö is the Danish capital of Copenhagen.
You know the score. Borgen. Alphabeat. Tivoli Gardens. Tuborg. Hygge.
It holds a special place in what counts as my “heart”, partly because they once hosted the song contest in a makeshift venue in a disused shipyard on an island (“stick all the Eurovision fans on an Island” etc) but mainly because it’s the first city we visited on the first study tour we did with SUs before I even worked at Wonkhe.
It all started in 2017 when the bus pulled into the Copenhagen Business School, where we were blown away by the creativity and volunteerism of students who do everything from running cafe bars in their spare time to driving careers engagement to organising my favourite ever iteration of a Freshers fair.
At the country’s premier specialist institution for business (“curiosity” and “social responsibility” are essential in its new strategy) there is that day when stalls pop up, clubs and societies moan about not having extension leads and students are badgered into paying 50 kr for a group they’ll never engage with.
But there’s also a separate day that runs like a festival – where there’s talks, “give it a go” activities, debates, challenges, graduate recruiters and external speakers. Pretty much every student group, university department, community organisation and engaged business puts something on – and it both builds belonging and immerses students in what’s to come in the year ahead.
And, for those that partake, there’s also Tuborg.
Learning to play the spoons
Seven years ago we then rattled into the city centre to meet the team at Studenterhuset – a shared facility for students of all institutions in Copenhagen that hosts associations, performing arts, sustainability projects, international student integration projects and excellent coffee. The closest we seem to get to facilities like that in our increasingly empty city centres is a ‘Spoons.
We’ve been back a few times now, and on each visit we’ve had a briefing from Danmarks Specialpædagogiske Forening (DSF), the country’s NUS, on the state of higher education policy in the country. And – partly because the Folketinget has twelve parties represented in it – the tale of the way in which coalition politics has seen several attempts at HE reform be attempted has become increasingly intriguing.
Back in 2017, we were interested to see a sector that had been cajoled into some structural change – ushering in a university sector, a technical sector and an academy sector. Short-cycle higher education is concentrated in nine Academies of professional higher education (Erhvervsakademier). The majority of medium-cycle education is concentrated in 7 University Colleges (Professionshøjskoler).
The university structure also included eight universities, five of which were multi-faculty – the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, Aalborg University, the University of Southern Denmark and Roskilde University. Three other universities specialise in fields like engineering (the Technical University of Denmark), information technology (The IT-University) and business studies (Copenhagen Business School).
And a number of university level institutions are regulated by the Danish Ministry of Culture and offer first, second and third cycle degree programmes in visual arts, music, cinematography, theatre and performing arts.
Given it’s such a small country and a comparatively small sector, what’s fascinating is the way in which it’s all funded and regulated – different types of HE both have different acts of Parliament underpinning their work and bespoke funding arrangements and regulation to suit their particular mission. It’s a marked contrast to the situation at home – where everyone moans that the regulatory regime doesn’t work for them, while the homogeneity of it all frustrates policy makers.
Coalition progress
Some of the HE policy we’ve seen is fab. Pre-pandemic, a DSF study found that one in five higher education students frequently experienced stress related to their studies, and one in ten felt lonely. And so given a government goal to make Denmark the best place for children and youth, the government allocated 25 million DKK for pilot projects aimed at enhancing student well-being – and the Ministry for Higher Education and Science even created a new division to support and evaluate them.
I sometimes wonder quite how bad figures on student mental health and loneliness would have to get before anything other than a doomed task and finish group and tiny slithers of top-up funding might manifest in Westminster.
A similar report in 2022 on disabled students found that students were facing all sorts of challenges – higher unemployment, higher dropout rates, lower well-being, and additional administrative burdens.
A government initiative supported enhanced involvement during welcome, investments in accessibility in learning environments, and increased flexibility in full-time study organisation – along with national support for universal design for study, clearer processes for support, and flexible course options like evening and online classes – adopting, rather than trashing, many of the things that had been worked up during the pandemic.
Coming out of Covid, there was quite a bit of support for post-pandemic expansion, extra maintenance money and a series of compensating initiatives for final year students enrolled in programmes with a significant amount of practice teaching or practical training – along with a funded catch-up scheme for those that had missed out, rather than the structural gaslighting (“it was just as good! You’ve missed nothing!”) we saw back home.
City slickers
Of course that expansion has its costs – with major pressures on student housing in university cities of the sort we see across Europe. That led to a controversial wheeze in 2011 – a plan to improve higher education opportunities across Denmark to counter the trend of people moving from rural to urban areas.
The plan was pretty much an existing urban cap – allowing increasing enrolment outside of major cities while reducing enrolment within them, and providing increased funding for higher education institutions (or at least campuses) in smaller areas. A new regional funding system was supposed to be implemented in 2023, with an aim to reduce city enrolment by 10 per cent by 2030.
Freedom of movement has generated pressures too. A couple of years ago, rising costs associated with EU/EEA students receiving the Danish SU (State Educational Grant) meant a projected spend of DKK 570 million in 2025, surpassing an agreed limit of DKK 449 million set in 2013 – and so another coalition agreement resolved to limit spend by reducing the number of courses offered in English, partly because few English-speaking graduates find employment in Denmark.
There’s been admissions reform too – although instead of a weird obsession with PQA, reforms were designed to address issues like unhealthy perfectionism, mismatched program choices, unequal admissions, and the complexity of the system from a student perspective.
But probably the most controversial set of reforms in recent years has been on Masters programmes.
Hurrying up
Last March a green paper aimed at “future-proofing” the Danish education system by proposing new, flexible master’s degree paths of varying lengths and specialisation levels, including:
- Master’s degrees lasting one year and three months with a clear labour market focus;
- Master’s degrees lasting two years with a higher degree of specialisation;
- Master’s degrees lasting two and a half to three years with a high degree of specialisation; and
- Flexible part-time master’s degrees allowing employment alongside studies.
The new fifteen month programmes were to cover all fields of study and be suited to students’ lifestyles, lowering tuition fees for adult education in the process, and would allow graduates to complete a second master’s degree full-time after two years of work.
But students smelt a rat – with DSF suspecting that the proposal was about saving money and rushing students into the labour market. Its impressive policy work on the issue highlighted the limits the approach would put on opportunities for internships and project collaborations, increased competition and stress to get onto what were bound to be seen as the more prestigious two year tracks, and what it suspected would be worse employability outcomes for those on shorter programs.
It’s interesting because Westminster (and those putting pressure on it) has also indulged in the occasional folly of thinking that students want shorter degrees for reasons similar to those expressed in the green paper. But time again around Europe, we find that students seem to disagree – arguing variously for more flexibility, and the protection of regimes that allow students to learn, grow and complete their credits at their own pace.
There’s little chance of the average UK master’s taking two years any time soon, given that one of the attractions from an international perspective is our seemingly magical ability to pack everything you need to do at Level 7 into a single year. It’s a pity – because as I’ve argued here before, our ability to shove students through a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in four years flat is almost certainly a reason why we’d give our eye teeth to have stats like one in five students experiencing study stress and one in ten feeling lonely.
