New government policy aims in decreasing the costs of education by 600M€. Most of the savings comes from secondary schools, but 125M€ savings comes from higher education, specially masters degrees. This has significant effect on university operations. First of all, introducing third semester for summer months is supposed to have effect on graduation times. Though I can’t see how this creates any savings since teachers and professors will have to be paid for teaching during these extra months. Second, students will get less practical training in companies and they will be less competent on graduation. Finally, this is in direct contradiction to the policy that government will also cut the student allowance, since most students are working especially during summers to support themselves.
Ok, instead of falling into despair, I have thought of few solutions how this can be beneficial to all. First, more practical training ETCS credits should be included to degrees. This way, summer time can be used in both, studying and earning money and experience. Second, bachelor’s thesis should be done in summertime, 10 ETCS points covers one whole semester, and one can work also during that time. Similarly, most of the independent project based learning courses should be moved on summer. This way, the total study time could be squeezed into maybe 4 full years and the cuts in student allowance doesn’t have significant effect on monthly earnings. This wouldn’t effect too much on the workload of teachers and professors during summertime. Also one thing to point out here is that summertime usually is not a vacation for university personnel, because that is the only time when we have undisturbed time to do research work.
One thing I am most curious is what the government is going to do to research funding, but that is a topic for later discussion.
