Students will have the flexibility to move between the partner
universities and be eligible for a diploma supplement awarded by
the IDEA League, which expects to benefit from the alliance by
recruiting students abroad and by using its collective power to
attract more funding.
From
left, Hans van Luijk, president TU Delft, Burkhard Rauhut, Rector
RWTH, Imperial Rector and IDEA League president Sir Richard Sykes
and Olaf Kubler, president ETH Zurich signing the agreement on IDEA
house style and web |
PRESIDENT Hans van Luijk offers an insight into Dutch education.
The differences between Delft and Imperial are obvious, he argues,
but the aims are similar.
"We want to be attractive to new students and use our
university's reputation to build virtual organisations widely
recognised as top technical institutions in Europe which people
fight to get into. Ideally, we want an international profile in a
global context which attracts top scientific talent and offers PhD
programmes from the rich resources our institutions can
provide.
TU Delft is the number one technical university. We're not
boasting. We are the oldest and biggest in Holland, taken on
faculty and discipline.
No university can be excellent at everything but we do have some
very strong facilities historically and we offer a top education
and diploma that is meaningful. Delft is a lovely place with a
character which feels good; it is not an enormous metropolis.
When you visit other institutions, you see how people deal with
each other - are they beauracratic or inspired? Overall, Imperial
has a £400 million budget - we are lower at 450 million
euros. We have 13,000 students, Imperial has 10,000 and we don't
have a medical faculty.
What's behind the statistics and organisation is very
interesting. It's clear to me that there's a struggle with funding
in Britain - 70 per cent is dependent on government, but this goes
down each year as the budget gets tighter. It's not a subject that
draws votes, and is always at the bottom of the pile.
Imperial has other funding mechanisms and I need to move our
organisation a lot more in the direction of other funding - lessons
can be learned from you.
Here, the government is generous on one side - in all Dutch
universities, students like to organise themselves around the
faculty and clubs are self-managed. A large number of grants enable
students to spend a year managing these organisations. It's
important students have these clubs in terms of social cohesion and
these extra-curricular activities are considered an important
element in their education.
TU Delft's students are less ambitious. UK students are more
competitive, and the UK system is more competitive. Whereas in
Britain the best marks in class are often made public, this is
unheard of in Holland where a pupil would be terribly embarrassed
to stand in front of his classmates to be told he was the best.
Being less competitive means we do not have such an aggressive
ranking system for universities. If you ask the average Dutchman
which are the best universities, you'll get a range of answers.
Also, the entrance system is different. Whereas with Oxford and
Cambridge you need to compete to get in, we can't select students.
If they've passed the exams, they have a right to enter.
Our students want good jobs in the end, but they don't measure
success in terms of earning large sums of money or being number
one. It is more about being satisfied in the job you want to
do."
THE IDEA League is a strategic alliance between Imperial College
London, TU Delft (Technische Universiteit Delft), ETH Zürich
(Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) and RWTH
Aachen (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochsc-hule Aachen).
Committed to the highest international standards in both research
and education, the League's members use common quality management
principles for their educational programmes.
