Danish higher education: From Bologna to de-internationalisation
OBS! Due to the COVID-19 situation the CHEF talk will take place online at a slightly changed time. Registration needed.
Date: May 12, 2020, 15.00-16.00
Venue: Online. Participants will recieve a Zoom-Link after registration deadline.
Fee: Free
Registration deadline: May 6, 2020. Please note there is only room for 50 participants.
Registration: Mail to Søren Bengtsen at 
ssbe@tdm.au.dk
Speaker: Hanne Tange, Associate Professor, Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Denmark
In this presentation Hanne Tange examines the case of international higher education in Denmark, as this has developed between 1999 and 2019. From the start, Danish universities were actively involved in the Europeanisation of higher education, aligning programmes, grading, entrance requirements and teaching language with standards recognised internationally. As a result, Denmark became a popular destination country for international students in the 2000s, which motivated a dramatic expansion in the number of English-medium courses.
By 2017, 49% of all MA programmes were taught in English and 11.3% of students identified as ‘international’. Coexisting with internationalism in HE is a welfare nationalist discourse. At first, this was mainly visible in relation to language, with the Danish People’s Party arguing against the use of English in research and education.
Since 2016, several Danish parties have expressed concerns over rising numbers of European Union citizens claiming free education and student grants, and in 2018, this led to the government demand that the number of international students be cut. As a result, several programmes have closed, while others were ‘de-internationalised’.