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Thursday 29 October 2009

Betaalbaar Onderwijs or the reduction of STUDENTS to ECTS and EDUCATION to EFFICIENCY

in this report you will find revealed the managerial approach of our faculty that reduces us STUDENTS to mere NUMBERS that need to be streamlined and makes our TEACHERS into COMPETITORS on the "free market of education".



for the Dutch this is a very nice read, revealing in its use of language how far we have come...

for those who cannot follow the bad management talk in Dutch, here are some of the more interesting points:


until 2012, 750 new bachelor students each year! this is the "limit" that can be squeezed into the available square meters!


decreasing the amount of elective courses in the masters from 79 to 8 (to make the choice easier for students)


“bouwkunde education is a process of mass production. regulations have to be more geared towards serial production” (please note that they are talking of US here).


phasing out non-profitable master tracks (since when is education about PROFIT?)


… further reducing “contact time” (we would regard this the most valuable time of interaction with your group and tutors) in design projects.


“more students require more input, more space and more costs (but in the long run more profit).”


“the students contribute in very constructive ways to cut more costs” (are that the same student bodies that are totally dependent on the management for their own budget?)


“its not so much tuition that accounts for financial problems but research” (so let's cut that part, which university needs research anyway?)


group sizes from 8 to 9 students or 16 to 18 students. on the same square meters there will be 9 instead of 8 students.



studio guidance can be reduced from 20 days to 18, to be realized as less guidance just before presentations (please let us know if this makes sense to anybody).


reduction of studio guidance for graduation students from one day a week to one day every two weeks. this can be realized with a voucher system in which student can "BUY" time from their tutors (maybe we can even introduce a tutor stock exchange in order to measure their market value).


1 in 10 tutors in the bachelor can be replaced by a student mentor (they come cheap).


introduce the eindhoven model where groups (of 9) are put together in larger groups of for example 54 to pool their 5 tutors. in this way there is always at least one tutor in the studio! (you can imagine where this is going to lead).


school-like teaching methods "designing you do like this!" are being developed (perfect to produce masses of generic archi zombies).


“in the long run this leads to less guidance in the masters” (or the most important part of our education).


“part of the teaching [in the masters] can be done on a large scale. imagine that courses are reduced from 30 to 10” (yes, imagine…).



international students in the masters can be "maximized" from about 200 now to 100 in the future.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I cant believe no one had done anything before, it is very sad and disturbing to read this document. And to think that architecture was one of the greatest prides of the Netherlands