Over the last few years the university has had to deal with several budget cuts coming from The Hague. The most influential of these cuts, at least for our college, is a new law that takes away ten percent of the funding of universities and puts it into a national fund. Universities can get this money back by asking for funding for high quality research proposals. In other words the universities can receive their own money back, if they do high-standing research. The UU-board has decided that the effects of this cut will be divided equally amongst the faculties, and that the faculties themselves will have to earn their money back by doing high quality research

Of course this is were is the problem for our college comes in: we do not have a research department and, therefore, there is no way for us to earn back the money about to be taken from us. Despite the best efforts to convince the UU-board that this measure is unequally harsh for us, the decision still stands and we will have to deal with it accordingly.

In order to balance the budget, we will have to cut fifteen percent of the money we are currently spending on education. This obviously is a huge chunck and we will have to do all we can to preserve the quality of education as good as possible. Despite this, the fact remains that it is almost inevitable that some quality will get lost; this is of course a big blow for us, especially considering that in our opinion the education at this point still had a lot of room for improvement.

Proposed plans by the administration

The administration has introduced several measures they intend to use to reduce the costs of our education. Their plan basically comes down to one factor; increase the average amount of students per class. The higher the average the cheaper the education will become per student. In order to do so they proposed three changes: Reduce the amount of classes, introduce combined classes and changing the professor payment system.

Reducing amount of classes

The first plan of the adminstration is to reduce the amount of classes on a yearly basis by thirty out of the two-hundred-and-sixty classes given right now. This comes down to about twelve percent fewer classes. Less classes and the same amount of students means more students per class, but of course also less choice and more contested classes.

Combined Classes

In order to prevent the rise in the amount of contested classes the administration is thinking about making ‘combined-classes’. Combined classes would work as follows; during one of your class-hours you will have a large lecture with up to a hundred students, and in the other two-hour-block you will have a small scale lecture where you can ask questions, have discussions etc. ASIC is very alarmed to hear about this plan, since, according to us, it conflicts with the ideas of liberal arts. These enormous classes will have no time to go into discussions, to answer questions properly, etc. in other words all the things we consider to be so special about UC.

Pay-cut for undersubscribed courses

The last plan put forward by the administration has to do with the pay the professors receive. Right now every professor receives the same amount of pay per course given. The new plan is to give professors with less than fifteen students per class only half of the pay, since giving this course would also require less time. In this context it is important to mention that over the last few years teachers have received less (paid) hours to work on their classes and have, therefore, been confronted with more tension between the work that has to be done and the time they have available to do so. The question thus arises, whether it is fair to put another cut on the teacher’s desk.

ASIC’s counter proposals

As we obviously had many concerns with the plans proposed by the administration we felt we had to come up with several other possible measures that could reduce costs while securing the quality of our education. Thinking about these measures obviously was incredibly difficult since almost all the ideas that can save money, will also have effects on the quality of education. So the proposals that will follow are not thought out in detail yet, and their consequences might not justify their cost reduction. We just felt that it would be good idea to at least think about these measures to see if they are viable. The student’s input on these issues is incredibly important and we will try to use every possibility we can to measure your opinion on these topics.

Sliding Scale Payment

The administrations current proposal with regard to payment in relation to the amount of students in a course has the disadvantage that it contains a rather arbitrary and harsh cut-off point. At this cut-off point, one single subscription makes the difference between full and half payment. We would like to propose that instead of having this cut-off point, there would be a formula calculating the amount of money received by a teacher: Assuming that every course has a fixed amount of work independent of the number of students in that course in the form of preparing classes, teaching, making exams, etc., we would propose that there would be a fixed amount of money that every teacher receives per course. This amount would be completely independent of the number of students in the course. Next to this there should be a compensation per student, the exact size of both the fixed and the dependant amount would be something that should be discussed between the administration and the teachers. This system has several advantages over the proposed system; it will not use an arbitrary cut-off point and it will allow for a weighted compensation to the teachers on campus supporting possible future plans of allowing more students per class by rewarding teachers for the increase in workload appropriately

Evaluation of the Tutor System

The Tutors on our campus are a valued asset and contribute to the personal touch that UC manages to provide in contrast to most other universities, so it is obvious that we should keep the Tutor-system intact. However, it might be time for us to ask some serious questions about a system that costs us about 500 thousand euro on a yearly basis. Questions such as; what do we want and need from this system? Are there possibilities to give fewer responsibilities to Tutors, allowing them to focus more on those core tasks we would like to preserve while reducing costs?

It is our opinion, for instance, that many students on this campus could do without a tutor under certain conditions. These conditions include, but might not be limited to: a registration system that no longer requires tutors (Osiris??), being a second or perhaps even a third year student, being of Dutch origin, always having the possibility to opt for a tutor anyways, etc. In such an evaluation a close look should also be taken at the responsibilities a tutor is expected to carry out and to what extent this actually happens at the moment. A recurring theme among students is the variability in the effort tutors put in and advice they give to students. Especially if courses will be cut and as a result oversubscription for courses will become more prominent, assistance in planning your curriculum as a new student is necessary. Yet we’ve been told of tutors that simply give the advice to do whatever, that stuff will work out, take courses outside your required tracks, which is likely to lead to issues in major completion towards the end of the student’s bachelor. 

Obviously, when such an evaluation would take place, extreme care should be taken that it will not harm the success formula of our college. At the same time, we found that there are many tasks now under the Tutor umbrella, that could also be done by students themselves such as; course registration, course switching in case of clash, putting a signature under a request to the DoE, etc.

Bringing UU to UC

We have understood that a project to bring UU students to the undersubscribed courses is already underway and would like to encourage all efforts that further this goal. This solution simply has the best of two-worlds. It will allow us to continue to maintain a diverse curriculum despite financial problems, while also allowing more integration of UC into the UU framework. The lack of contact between UC and the rest of the university is often cited as one of the down-sides of UC. Furthermore, it will have possible positive effects for the university at large, allowing their students to have the same personal and high-standing education that we are allowed to enjoy. Besides bringing just students to our college, it would also be interesting to look into the possibility of bringing complete courses within our gates. By aligning our timeslots with those on the University we could possibly allow class rooms that are not being used for UC-classes to be used by UU-faculties. The same goes for the available time-slots on the Wednesday afternoon, getting all our classes full during those timeslots would mean we could save money on housing, which has become increasingly expensive over the last years.