DENMARK: Students should pay tax to study

Danish students in future will have to pay an extra tax to help balance university budgets, says Professor Lauritz B Holm-Nielsen, Rector of the Aarhus University, the second largest in Denmark. Writing in the Danish newspaper Politiken, Holm-Nielsen argued that universities were not in a position where they could avoid discussion of this issue as well as tuition fees.

Together with Professor Ralf Hemmingsen, Rector of Copenhagen University, Holm-Nielsen presented data showing that DKK1.22 billion (US$224,000,000) each year was transferred from university budgets for research to teaching. Such transfers were necessary to sustain the teaching of students but research was bleeding, the two rectors said.

They claimed that because of these transfers, the political goal of allocating 1% of GDP for research was not being achieved.

Denmark's new Science Minister, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, said she was not satisfied with her first dialogue with Danish universities and they should focus on discussions of student numbers, deficits and budget cuts.

Teaching in universities was based on research, Sahl-Madsen said. It was therefore not easy to see what the real distribution was between research and teaching.

"I am not going to interfere with the internal distribution of resources at the universities," she said.

One way to tax students would be to limit grant allocations to four years of full-time studies and, after that, provide all student support as a loan, Holm-Nielsen argued. This had been proposed by the Danish Tax Commission earlier.

"It is absolutely a bonus for each student who enters the labour force one year earlier, society will earn half a million kroner. That is an argument everyone will understand," Holm-Nielsen said.

The feedback from many students who had completed their degrees was immediate: they wanted to know where they could collect the 500,000 kroner.