Ministry wants universities to specialise
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The Ministry of Education wants several universities to put forward proposals in the coming spring on areas in which they expect to excel on the international, or at least national level.
Universities of applied sciences are being urged to merge into fewer institutions.
At least the universities of Vantaa, Tampere, and Eastern Finland, as well as the new Aalto University, and the Swedish language Hanken School of Economics are being told to polish their profiles and strategies for the 2010-2012 period.
There are not many fields that the institutions would drop, according according university rectors and chairs of university boards interviewed by Helsingin Sanomat.
Finland’s disperse network of institutions of higher education has come under criticism on an international and national level. There are said to be too many units, and they are too small.
“Pressure is high, but I know of no negotiations anywhere except for the Kajaani and Oulu regions”, says Ritva Laakso-Manninen, the chairwoman of ARENE, the Rectors' Conference of Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences. She heads the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki, which served as a merger model for others.
Universities had been asked already in the autumn to put forward bold proposals on their areas of strength, but these have not been forthcoming. They all want to continue to be multi-disciplinary research universities.
The ministry says that the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku, and Tampere University of Technology had made the most progress in defining their profiles.
The governing bodies of the other institutions are to meet in February and march to consider their priorities.
“I don’t want to answer. We are only drawing up the strategy for which the board is drawing the guidelines”, says Kaija Holli, rector of the University of Tampere.
“It’s the way the game is played. The allocation of resources should be considered”, promises Petteri Taalas, chairman of the board of the University of Eastern Finland.
“The rector, who is the managing director, would be a better person to ask, but we don’t have any dramatic need to prune away anything”, says Björn Wahlroos, chairman of the board of Hanken.
“It is a very interesting matter”, says Hanken rector Marianne Stenius on the question of the cuts. “The volume of teaching in the early phases of studies could be reduced, with a greater effort on international work.”
Stenius opposes increasing the cooperation between Hanken and the University of Helsinki to the point pf a merger. She feels that common masters’ programmes and research projects would be enough.
“It is an option that has not been completely ruled out”, Wahlroos said, commenting on the possibility to turn Hanken into a faculty of the University of Helsinki.
Vaasa has a concentration of higher education, with teaching in Finnish, Swedish, and English in seven different university-level units.
Ole Norrback, the chairman of the board of the University of Vaasa, says that cooperation among the various units in Vaasa operates well. “In Helsinki it is viewed negatively, even though cooperation within one university is usually no easier.”
The strength of the University of Vaasa is its first field, which is commerce, but there is room for more concentration in languages and technology.
“In technology we could concentrate on the energy field. It would not be a good idea to reduce volume in our strong language immersion teaching just because it does not attract more students.”
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 4.2.2010 - TODAY |
 Ministry wants universities to specialise |
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