Photo Anna den Hartog If WUR gets extra Covid funding from the government, the Executive Board already has ideas about how to spend some of it. The board expects a new wave of students who still need to do an internship or thesis research after the coronavirus measures have been lifted.
Last week, the caretaker cabinet allocated 8.5 billion euros to the National Education Programme for support to students and researchers in catching up after delays caused by Covid. It is not yet clear how much of that money will go to the universities. But the WUR Executive Board is already thinking about how best to use a one-off injection of funding.
Rector Arthur Mol estimates that a number of students have not been able to find a suitable internship or thesis project due to the Covid restrictions and have therefore postponed that component of their degree.
‘A surge in internship and thesis students calls for extra educational support’
Rector Arthur Mol
Now that the students will receive a discount on their tuition fees for Covid-related delays, he expects a peak in the numbers of Wageningen students wanting to do their thesis or internship. WUR is currently studying the size of this group.
Welfare
‘This kind of surge in internship and thesis students calls for additional educational support and supervision. That would be a good use of some of those extra millions for education,’ says Mol.
Meanwhile, the university is also trying to get a clear picture of which students are experiencing mental health problems due to the Covid restrictions and working at home. ‘Looking at the course evaluations and the pass rates, we don’t see any difference from the figures before Covid, but we are hearing – often second-hand – that some students are finding it hard and are lonely. We are trying to find out about how those students are doing through the study advisors, study associations and student societies.’