Students face further ‘hybrid’ semester this summer

Teaching at Austrian higher education institutions is not expected to be back to normal this summer. Universities are calling for more government support to cope with the COVID-19 crisis, including more money for testing.

“We are reckoning with having to carry on with teaching and research activities in what will certainly be difficult, hybrid conditions until the end of the summer semester,” says Sabine Seidler, president of Universities Austria (uniko), which represents the country’s 22 public higher education institutions.

Teaching and sitting tests are currently being performed mostly on a digital basis, but with on-site laboratory and practical exercises and tests where no other options are available. Seidler maintains that arrangements are working out well, but concedes that both teachers and students are demonstrating a certain degree of fatigue.

“Universities aren’t just schools for young grown-ups,” she explains, stressing that institutions also have a role to play as places of social and societal discourse and communication.

More students seek counselling

Seidler also notes that more and more of Austria’s students are visiting student counselling services.

“Students are now also seeking support who wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so before the onset of corona[virus],” Seidler says, adding that she fears there will be more dropouts. “I haven’t got any evidence of this – it’s just a feeling.”

Establishing attendance of lectures and seminars can only go ahead step by step, according to Seidler. It requires testing, vaccinating and the support of the education ministry.

Uniko has voiced disappointment at the recent announcement by Education Minister Heinz Faßmann of €1 million (US$1.2 million) to fund COVID-19 antigen tests for university teaching programmes.

“With their staff of more than 60,000 employees and nearly 290,000 students, this amount isn’t more than a drop in the ocean for the universities,” Seidler says, stressing that institutions are well aware that raising attendance levels and research activity again calls for coronavirus test strategies.

Following test strategies developed so far, according to internal estimates, institutions would require around a million tests for the summer semester, assuming two tests a week for the individuals concerned. While businesses are entitled to €10 per test in government support, universities have to finance their effort almost entirely from their own budget, Seidler notes.

The €1 million announced is sufficient for a mere 100,000 tests among the 22 universities, she adds, and it is also unclear how the money ought to be distributed.

“Not only are the universities enabling the resumption of attendance teaching with the new measures, they are also contributing to containing the pandemic,” Seidler notes.

She would generally like to see universities obtain a better position in the priority list of Austria’s vaccination campaign. They are currently sixth among a total of seven priority levels.

“We are expecting students and staff to show a very high readiness to be vaccinated and the universities to set an example in this respect,” she says, adding that while all vulnerable groups must obviously take precedence, vaccinating people at universities at an earlier stage ought to be considered.

The Austrian government is generally eager to step up progress in the country’s vaccination campaign, and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has indicated that Russian or Chinese vaccines would be acceptable, and could be manufactured in Austria, provided that they are certified by a European regulator.

Kurz told a German newspaper that geopolitics was not the issue, but rather “getting the safest vaccines as quickly as possible, regardless of who developed them”.

Michael Gardner E-mail: michael.gardner@uw-news.com