Universities praised for national collaboration that almost fell victim to budget cuts

Despite political uncertainties and budget cuts, the national sector plans of the universities are progressing well, according to three interim evaluations. Keep them in place, is the message to the cabinet.

Universities receive 200 million euros annually for national division of responsibilities and collaboration across four domains: science & engineering, medicine & health sciences, social & behavioural sciences and the humanities.

This is organised through the so-called sector plans. The idea is that universities complement one another rather than compete. They are also expected to jointly keep certain degree programmes running and offer more permanent contracts to their staff.

This approach is working well, according to the three interim evaluation reports (the social sciences and humanities share one report). “The universities deserve great praise”, writes the science & engineering committee, for example, referring to the political uncertainties and budget cuts.

Budget cuts

The previous cabinet of PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB initially wanted to scrap the sector plans altogether. This prompted fierce criticism from the universities: had they not made governance agreements with the cabinet? What would those agreements be worth if they could simply be abandoned?

The then minister of Education, Eppo Bruins, kept the sector plans in place, but still imposed cuts. He simply reduced funding elsewhere in the universities’ budgets. In addition, universities are seeing their income decline as student numbers fall.

Despite this, they have continued implementing the sector plans successfully, the interim evaluations state. The advice is therefore that the cabinet should continue funding these plans and ensure that new sector plans are developed in a few years’ time.

Minister Rianne Letschert will not respond to the evaluations until this autumn. The chances of a negative judgement appear slim, as the Jetten cabinet wants to encourage ‘profiling and collaboration’ among universities, she wrote to the House of Representatives, ‘following the model of sector plans’.

Room for improvement

There is, of course, room for improvement in some areas, the reports also show. In science and engineering, the sector plan funding was also intended to increase the number of female staff members. This has not been achieved everywhere.

In addition, the sector plan for medicine and health sciences should also involve universities that do not have a medical faculty but do conduct health sciences research. At present, these universities are not yet participating.

In the social sciences and humanities, workloads remain high, even though the sector plan was supposed to provide ‘stability and room to breathe’. However, the budget cuts worked against this goal, the report states.

In these disciplines, there has been ‘some delay’ in implementing the sector plans, ‘partly because of shifting internationalisation policies in recent years and the budget cuts introduced at most universities’.

At the same time, the sector plan has also had positive effects: universities have been better able to absorb the negative consequences together – for example in language studies – than they would have been individually.