Column by Anders Bjarklev, President at DTU, and Carsten Toft Boesen, CEO of NIRAS and Vice President of the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences (ATV). Published at borsen.dk on 11 December 2022.
It is becoming clear that the outcome of the ongoing negotiations to form a new government will be a government across the centre, where both the Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratiet and the Liberal Party of Denmark (Venstre) want to shorten a large part of the Master’s degree programmes in Denmark from 5 to 4 years.
For study programmes in the technical and natural sciences, the plan is to shorten 30 per cent of the MSc study programmes, and the political objective is that many students should be able to become engineers in just 4 years.
The argument is that the shorter programme structure - through more teaching and more vocational activities - will get students through the system and into the labour market faster. Because Denmark lacks qualified labour.
We basically agree with this. That is with the view that Denmark lacks a qualified, well-educated workforce, especially in the technical fields.
According to the latest forecast from the Danish Society of Engineers, IDA, if you look no further than 2025 we will experience a shortage of 6,500 highly qualified engineers who can solve problems relating to the climate crisis, energy crisis, and biodiversity crisis.
The engineers who earn a degree from the universities almost all find work and thus help solve the major societal challenges we are facing. This applies both to the students in the universities’ 3.5-year technical professional bachelors’ programmes and to the students in the 5-year MSc study programmes.
It is therefore paradoxical that the political reform proposal intends to spend time and use resources on creating a third study programme of 4 years. A 4-year study programme that is, in fact, virtually identical to the 3.5-year study programme that already exists, with the main difference being that it is simply six months longer. Let us instead stick to the solutions that we know work.
Vocational approach creates demand
When we appeal to politicians to drop their plans for a shortened MSc study programme, it is not because of a lack of will or vision. Quite the opposite!
The existing 3.5-year technical professional bachelor’s programme - which includes Bachelors of Engineering (BEng) at DTU - precisely meets the political vision of increasing the supply of labour quickly.
The latest figures from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s data warehouse show that technical professional bachelors from the 2020 year cohort have an unemployment rate of just 4.6 per cent. This means that the majority are in employment, and the same pattern applies to MSc graduates.
The high level of employment is due to companies' great demand for both Bachelors of Engineering (BEng) and Masters of Science in Engineering (MSc Eng) that can solve the major challenges we are facing. And precisely the BEng programme has a clear vocational structure, which is virtually identical to the new programme structure that is being proposed politically.
The Bachelors of Engineering (BEng) students complete a mandatory internship, they are in direct contact with relevant companies due to close collaboration between universities and industry, and 63 per cent of the students have relevant student jobs that enable them to gain a foothold in the labour market while they are still studying.
There is no need to gamble with this success rate.
If the next government is to rapidly increase the supply of labour in the technical field - which is crucial for the green transition - the recommendation is therefore clear: Don't shorten the MSc study programmes. It makes much more sense to increase admissions to the technical university study programmes which already exist and which we know get graduates into employment.
