This text has been translated from Norwegian with the assistance of GPT UiO.
The Ministry of Education changed its distribution model for universities and colleges effective from 2025, and the University Board adopted an adjusted distribution model for UiO in October 2024, effective from the distribution for 2026. Following the decision by the University Board, the Dean established a working group to develop a proposal for an adjusted distribution model for the faculty. The mandate of the working group states that the proposal for the adjusted distribution model should be:
- Incentive-correct and thus continue the main lines of the Ministry of Education's and UiO's distribution models.
- Contribute to financial predictability at departments and centres.
- Be simple and transparent and sufficiently flexible to allow for new initiatives.
The model should also facilitate that the basic units themselves are responsible for prioritising resource use within the allocation.
The working group has had several meetings, and last week the department and centre leaders discussed some of the questions we need to address in the work on adjusting the faculty's distribution model. The discussions were constructive and very useful for the further work.
An expressed goal of UiO's distribution model is that it should contribute to strengthening UiO's results in teaching. UiO's model continues two of the result indicators that are in the Ministry of Education's model, namely study credits and doctorates. In addition to these two indicators, UiO's internal distribution model includes an indicator for EU funding where the rate for payout is reduced to 60 percent of the current rate. Only changes in these result indicators will have consequences for the overall future result allocation to the faculty. It is therefore worth noting that the faculty already scores high on UiO's result indicators, especially study credits and EU funding.
On average, our students took around 46 credits in 2024. Internally at the University of Oslo, students in the faculties of Medicine, Dentistry, Education, and Law took slightly more credits per year than our students, while students in the faculties of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Humanities, and Theology lagged behind. In 2023 and 2024, our students took more credits per year than students at our sister faculties in Bergen and Trondheim. Our staff have also been very successful with applications for research funding from the EU, and the increase in EU funding has been a full 111 percent from 2017 to today.
It is well known that it is easier to improve results when the starting point is weak than when the starting point is good. Therefore, it is probably prudent to be modest about how much it is realistic for the faculty to improve its future allocations by having today's students produce more study credits per year. It is difficult to estimate how much potential for improvement we have regarding EU funding from an already high level. As for doctorates, the trend has been slightly declining since the peak year in 2015, and the number of doctorates per year is now around 50. Here, there is short-term room for some improvement, especially since many of the basic units have increased the number of PhD positions in recent years.
But what principles should underpin the faculty's redistribution of the allocation we receive from UiO at SV? Discussions of distribution models can easily be dominated by economic terminology. However, an adjusted distribution model must primarily address many questions that directly concern the faculty's academic activities and core tasks. One such question is whether the faculty's distribution model should continue the three result indicators that are in UiO's model, namely study credits, doctorates, and EU funding. Should increasing the number of study credits, the number of doctorates, and research funding from the EU be something that the faculty's distribution model should also stimulate? There seems to be broad agreement at the faculty that the answer to this question is yes. Another, albeit related question, is whether the faculty's model should also have other result indicators than those in UiO's model. UiO places few constraints on the faculties' own distribution models, and we must therefore carefully consider whether we want to stimulate other aspects than those stimulated through the result indicators adopted by the University Board for UiO. At the full-day meeting with the heads of departments, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of having a result incentive also for NFR funding and whether the faculty's adjusted model should include a candidate incentive, i.e., a financial reward to the basic units that have students who complete the study programmes they are admitted to. UiO has chosen not to have such a candidate incentive in its model, but the faculty is free to include it if the faculty board wishes. ARENA is a pure research centre, and there will be a need to create a separate model for ARENA that only includes result indicators related to research activities.
UiO has chosen to continue 100 percent of the Ministry of Education's rate for study credits and doctorates. This means that the faculties that improve their results related to study credits and doctorates retain the entire financial gain from the improvement. The faculties that achieve weaker results must, on the other hand, bear the entire financial cost in the form of allocation cuts. A third question we must address in an adjusted distribution model is whether our faculty-internal distribution model should continue 100 percent of UiO's rates, or whether we should reduce the rate we continue to the departments and centres. Should the deparmtments and centres that improve their results retain the entire financial gain from the improvement, or should we mitigate the financial impacts of changes in results over time by using a lower rate than UiO has adopted? If we choose a lower rate than UiO, the underlying units will not retain the entire gain if they achieve better results. On the other hand, they will be spared from bearing the entire cost if the results become weaker.
The proposal for an adjusted distribution model for the faculty must address several other questions than those mentioned here, and it will be discussed in several forums before the faculty board can make a decision on the matter. However, I am confident that we will land on a distribution model that will continue to create good frameworks for research and teaching activities at the Faculty of Social Sciences.