Wednesday, 3 December 2008
Aalborg University Esbjerg plans
My university just published their take on how they will develop a new sole university in Esbjerg today, given that they will take over the SDU branch.
While I think Esbjerg is a great city to study, apparently, I am one of the few to share that view. According to an article in the NordJyske newspaper, student in-take has dropped to around 200 per year (counting both SDU and AAU). Youngsters are happily choosing the major cities, like Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense and Aalborg for their studies. Granted there is a greater diversity of studies available, and a more active student life (depends on the students ofcause), then in Esbjerg, I am amazed with the number of teachers per student is very high, so teaching will be more "intense", which I think is a great benefit to the learning curve of the students.
Anyway, now the government has asked both SDU and AAU to present their vision for how they will develop the university, if they are to be the only university in town. (There will be a third report, created by a third party, on how it will go if things continue as they are).
The vision of AAU can be downloaded here (its in danish sorry). I will summarize shortly how I see the changes here below:
- A set of new educations will be introduced. The educations from SDU will continue, but new studies like MBA, and cand.jur (law) will be added. At AAU the focus will be on new studies in environment/energy technology.
- The physical settings will be "upgraded". Esbjerg city is not interesting by itself, so they want to create an active environment at the university, with cafes, bars (yay!), parks and outdoor sports areas, and remodel old buildings for student activities.
By this the hope is to increase the number of students to around 2500 in 2013.
I have not been able to find anything on SDUs vision, the only thing is that in JV (the paper edition, sorry), there is apparently an article saying that SDU is holding back showing their vision to the public.
Anyway, it is all very interesting to me. I don't know SDU's vision, so it is hard to be objective on what is best. Research-wise, I think AAU is maybe a bit better, they are more used to autonomous campuses (eg. they have in Calcutta and China), so easier to maintain own research goals and fundings, and not just "receiving instructions from HQ".
According to the news, 15. of December is some decision date. There is now an article in JV about this.











