‘Educational Planning Programme is a waste of time and money’

Utrecht University struggles with a shortage of teaching spaces, but its lecture halls are not well utilised. Many lectures take place on Mondays between 11:00 am and 1:00 pm and working groups are usually scheduled at the end of the week. As a result, the university bursts at the seams at certain times and is pretty quiet at others. In addition, assessments show that some of the reserved lecture halls are ultimately not used for classes and end up empty.

According to UU, its buildings have enough space to accommodate all educational activities, provided that some lectures are held at less popular times, such as between 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm. The university sees no need for additional buildings.

Educational Planning Programme
Frank van der Salm, Associate Professor of Economics, is a member of the University Council. He was responsible for his department's teaching timetable for many years. At the time, he too noticed that it was hard to satisfy all lecturers' wishes because too many of them wanted their classes to happen at popular times and there were simply not enough rooms for that. Van der Salm knows better than anyone that something needs to be done about the timetable problem.

As a University Council member, Van der Salm has kept an eye on the progress of the Educational Planning Programme, which was set up at the beginning of 2023 to solve the issue. 

He is amazed at how substantial the project has become. First, a committee and three subcommittees including UU staff and an external project manager worked on a definition for the term "quality criteria". Then, they classified these criteria into two categories: draft quality criteria and prioritised quality criteria. After many hours of deliberation, they ended up with a list of 43 quality criteria. 

Democratic
Van der Salm doesn't understand how this relates to the timetable. So, he wrote a memo on behalf of the staff section of the University Council (document only accessible to users with a Solis ID, Ed.) saying they are critical of how time-consuming and expensive the Educational Planning Programme has become.

The memo denounces what the staff members see as an inefficient governance style. "Some university-wide projects are made unnecessarily big by involving too many people from the entire university," Van der Salm writes. "It is in the university's system to always seek very democratic, decentralised support, which makes sense for certain things, but it doesn't make it any easier to tackle concrete problems. Sometimes, the university must dare to take the lead and decide for itself how things will go."

Lots of hours from UU staff
The Student & Academic Affairs Office, which is in charge of the project, has written an draft action plan (only accessible to those with a Solis ID, Ed.) together with the consultancy firm Durieux, which has worked on similar projects in seven other Dutch universities. Durieux was only involved in this design plan from 2022 to mid-2023. For the implementation phase, UU partnered with Andrea Bonarius' small consulting firm.

According to action plan the programme will last four years and be divided into eight subprojects involving numerous teams, including the programme team, communication advisers and ambassadors. There is a steering committee, a sounding board group, and other committees and working groups.

The Directorate of SO&O informs in writing that the Educational Planning program is budgeted at 1.47 million euros, of which 1.06 million euros is expected to go to external hiring. So far, 595,000 euros has been spent on consultants for the current subprojects. "But this is only part of it. The actual costs are much higher because UU employees are being asked to think along," Van der Salm notes. 

"The action plan estimates that the UU staff involved in the project will dedicate 3,400 hours to this. And that's just for the development phase, the implementation phase is yet to be added to that. Apart from direct costs, I find it much worse that employees are being called on to work on this even though their workloads are already heavy. These are very committed, loyal people, but not necessarily timetable experts, and they are being asked to participate in committees and working groups. That is so inefficient. A small group of employees, responsible for rostering and knowledgeable about it, should be working on this project."

The solution is already known 
According to Van der Salm, the timetable issue is an obvious problem, but the solution to it is already known. "The project is a waste of time and money. We are now taking a sort of U-turn. The university is afraid to take and defend unpopular top-down decisions."

"1 million euros are being spent on consultants and UU employees are supposed to dedicate endless hours to it. Only then a decision will be made. Maybe the university is hoping that people on the work floor will be less resistant and willing to accept changes if consultants say something has to be done, not them."

"We can blame the consultants for being inefficient, but it was the university that delegated the project's design to an external party in the first place. We could say UU fell into the consultancy trap. It is naive to let the person in charge of the project write down their hours. Consultants will obviously make the project as big as possible and get all sorts of things and people involved."

Staying in control
Van der Salm is not against hiring consultants with specific knowledge to help with things like the dashboard that has been drawn up, which shows the entire university which classes are being taught in which lecture halls at which times.

However, when it comes to the Educational Planning Programme, he does not believe that UU needs consultants in the role of a program manager. "With more centralised management and a greater role for our own schedulers and experts, we can arrive at the same solutions. The difference is it will cost us a million euros less."

The staff members' memo will be discussed by a UU Council committee on Monday, February 10. The staff members are asking the university administration to put an end to the collaboration with the consultancy firm.

Van der Salm: "The Educational Planning Programme is mentioned on the 2025 budget yet again, for a whopping 369,000 euros. Let's just stop and thank all the consultants now that the dashboard is finished. Then the Student & Academic Affairs Office can be in charge again.’’

In a written response, the Student & Academic Affairs Office explained that it decided for external hiring because UU employees already have a lot on their plates. "Hence the choice to hire an external capacity to work closely with various UU employees and lead the programme."

According to the Student & Academic Affairs Office, this would allow the UU staff to focus on the content. "By getting them involved in developing these results, we make it so that they are optimally prepared to do it. This way, we prevent the programme's results from being shelved." The Student & Academic Affairs Office argues that the workload would have been much heavier for the employees involved if an external party had not been hired.

“The university does indeed have to make budget cuts, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't invest in certain areas that we think are important and that in the long run lead to lower costs. By making better use of our teaching spaces, we can save money.” 

Furthermore, the office argues that the programme has "delivered the intended results" so far. The dashboard is ready and they are currently working on a timeslot model to make better use of teaching spaces. "The University Council is asking relevant questions about our organisational culture, in which we prefer to make decisions based on consensus and broad support. Therefore, we also take the council's suggestions on how to increase the efficiency of the project seriously".