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Massive Layoffs Hit University of Copenhagen

Posted by timothy on from the not-up-to-snuff dept.

jones_supa writes: University of Copenhagen is cutting deep into its staff to cut operation costs. Even though a great deal of the savings are aimed at administration and service, they are expected to affect the quality of education and research many years ahead. More than 500 teachers, researchers and employees in service and administrative jobs will be leaving. This corresponds to 7% of all staff. 209 employees can anticipate being laid off, while 323 jobs are either discontinued or terminated via voluntary redundancy. In addition to this, the university will have to reduce its PhD intake by 10% in the coming years. This is the outcome of the government's 2016 budget which imposes huge savings on research and education. As you might remember, we just heard about a similar situation in University of Helsinki in Finland.

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They have an insane amount of lecturers, who creep along in acedemia always close to full unemployment, running seminars which are barely visited by students. Less PhD students is also a good idea, it's time to stop throwing a PhD out to anyone who writes something that superficially resembles a book without any real quality control. Half of all theses are not worth the paper they are printed on.

    However, to fair, I'm pretty sure the current fascist government does it for all the wrong reasons and certainly not to improve science and education.

    1. Re:About time by paradigm82 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This! It used to be only the brightest of a class that got offered PhD's but thanks to the more than tripling of PhD's over the past 10 years you routinely see very "ordinary" students who study PhD. In fact, it seems to even be an attraction to some of the lazy ones so they can hang around with their friends at uni at 3-4x the income they had as students, compared to - say - going to the private sector where the salary might be higher, but the actual productivity requirements even more so. The Danish PhD instutition is a disaster - having a PhD in Denmark is at best a neutral indicator of ability, and probably bordering on the negative.