With its 7 campuses, 363 buildings, 27 thousand students, 6300 employees, and 5.7 million medical procedures, the University of Debrecen is at the top of national statistics.
The Senate of the University of Debrecen approved and accepted its Institutional Development Plan for the 2016-2020 time period at an assembly session held on March 10, which had also been unanimously seconded by the Consistorial Body of the university previously. This strategic document assesses the educational, demographic, and economic environment of the institution, evaluates the competitors, the portfolio of programs on offer, the human resources implementing the programs, the R&D activities conducted, the international relations, the infrastructure, as well as the operation and the economic performance of the institution. A separate document contains the Sports Strategy of the University of Debrecen and the concept of establishing a Center for Innovations. In what follows as the first part of our three-part series, you will find revealing samples of these two documents.
Student Body
The University of Debrecen is one of the most significant institutions of higher education in Hungary, with the second largest student body in the nation of more than 27 thousand students altogether. With regard to the number of first-choice applicants in the first semester of the 2015/2016 academic year, it is also the second most popular institution in Hungarian higher education. Broken down to program levels, 62.6% of first choice applicants signed up for B.A. studies, 19.4% for M.A. programs, 5.9% chose higher education vocational training courses, and 12.1% went for combined B.A./M.A. programs.
For the programs offered in the fall of 2015, the university admitted a total of 6484 students, 77.1% of which were recipients of state subsidy, which means that only 22.9% had to finance their own tuition. Almost 80% of the students admitted came from the secondary schools of the immediate region around Debrecen. The rest were largely from the region of Northern Hungary (almost 13%) and the Central Hungarian region (over 4%), while there were also some freshers from the Southern Great Plain region opting for a few individual faculties. Debrecen can boast of the highest number of international students in Hungary from as many as 98 different countries all over the world, making up at least 13% of the overall student population. For the fall semester of the 2015 academic year, 1192 international students were admitted, increasing the total number to 4028.
Academic Programs
In the first semester of the 2015/2016 academic year, there were various academic programs offered in as many as 338 majors of twelve different program areas at the 14 faculties of the University of Debrecen. In addition to the 124 BA majors and the 123 MA majors, the proportion of combined B.A./M.A. programs constitutes 3.5%, the higher education vocational training courses make up 10.9%, while postgraduate specialist training courses 12.4% within the total number of programs available. In 2015, there were five majors (animal husbandry engineering, food engineering, agricultural engineering, crop production engineering, and mechanical engineering) offered at two faculties (Center for Agricultural Sciences, Faculty of Engineering) that launched a dual training program in cooperation with 17 companies, for a total of 28 students. During the course of the past five academic years, the university has doubled the number of foreign language majors on offer, totaling the current figure of such programs at 33. In the currently available 23 doctoral schools, PhD students have a choice of 67 different doctoral programs to pick from.
The University of Debrecen runs a Talent Support Program (
DETEP), in which there are 555 students participating at present. In addition, there are also 10 student research groups for the students to choose from. These are channels of talent support at the university level, offering a chance to gifted students to acquire extra knowledge within their specific fields of interest while they are also involved in practical research aided by the student support system.
In Debrecen, the largest number of students is in BA programs, making up roughly 60−75% of the total student number. The number of students in MA programs has been the highest at the University of Debrecen in the past five years, and this number has also grown most dynamically recently. As regards the number of students involved in doctoral programs, the University of Debrecen is ranked first in Hungary.
Faculty
In 2015, there were 1426 full-time and 93 part-time employees at the university responsible for teaching, representing 23.9% of the total number of employees. Broken down to individual age-groups, the group of 35–44 years was the largest, encompassing 36.6% of the overall teaching staff. In 2015, one-third of the active faculty were already past 50 years of age. More than 73.6% of the total of the faculty members had an academic degree, while 12.3% of these were holders of degrees issued by
MTA [Hungarian Academy of Sciences]. The student-faculty ratio at the University of Debrecen was 20:1 last year, which would roughly correspond to the national average.
Research
The top priority research fields at the University of Debrecen are: medical and health sciences, the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, natural sciences, sports science, electronics, and information technology. In 2015, there were 14 MTA-supported and 8
University - MTA Lendület [“Momentum”] research groups operating in the institution, where modern infrastructure assists state-of-the-art research, and the number of laboratories available for research purposes is almost 500. The academic potential of the university is clearly indicated by the annual figures of 3000-3500 academic publications as listed by sources like Scopus, WoS, MTMT and
iDEa Academic Profiles, the last one of which is operated by the University of Debrecen.
Health Issues
As the regional center of progressive medical and health-related treatments, the Medical School and Health Science Centre of the University of Debrecen is responsible for providing medical coverage for as many as 3 million individuals. The services of the center are rendered to an annual 95 thousand inpatients and 887 thousand outpatients, corresponding to approximately 1 million medical care cases per year and 5.7 million procedures altogether, rendered by an internationally acclaimed body of physicians and health practitioners in the most prestigious medical and health center of the
Tiszántúl [Trans-Tibiscan] region.
R&D
The revenue coming from R&D activities is steadily growing every year. In 2015, it was more than HUF 9.7 billion, which constitutes a 40% increase compared to the 2011 figure. The university has applied for and been granted support for R&D from various organizations up to HUF 24.702 billion in the course of the past five years, out of which HUF 6.766 billion has been issued by National Research, Development and innovation Office through the EU Intermediate Body, while indirectly and directly from the EU, it has received HUF 14.797 billion and HUF 1.819 billion. In 2015, the university was a partner in effective 346 R&D contracts, out of which 57 was international and 289 domestic. In cooperation with its, partner institutions, the university also operates a network of so-called external departments, the number of which currently is 47.
During the course of the past 8 to 10 years, five clusters have been established, each one of which is properly accredited, while two of them also have international accreditation. Through these clusters, there are several hundred companies and enterprises within the scope of a structured cooperation network, while there are also separate agreements signed by the university with more than a thousand partners related to the practical training of the students.
International Relations
Due to its broad range of international connections, the university has signed cooperation agreements with several hundred partner institutions, including universities and colleges. Among the students, the most popular of these are the academic mobility projects, in the framework of which there are 150 students on average every year who spend some time abroad from Debrecen.
Next to Erasmus, the other program acting as an incentive for international mobility in the time period between 2012 and 2015 was Campus Hungary, in which the University of Debrecen participated at a remarkable level of success. It performed best among the universities of the so-called Convergence Regions during the time period of the first 5 Campus Hungary calls for applications, thus enabling about 3000 students and faculty from Debrecen to participate in mobility projects abroad.
In addition to its academic partnership in teaching, the University of Debrecen is also active in pursuing cooperation projects in the field of research. In the 7th Framework Program of the European Union for Research and Technological Development, the University of Debrecen has won support in cooperation with its partners in Europe for at least 50 projects, so it ranks quite high in the list of universities and colleges in Hungary getting support from FP7 projects.
Staff
Staff headcount in 2015 was 6339 at the university, out of which there were 4661 employees, i.e., 73.5%, who were non-teaching or non-research staff. Human resources responsible for nursing care amounted to 2673 employees, which is 42.2% of the total number of staff. Within the total number of staff, the proportion of employees working as other staff in teaching, research, and central management was 31.4%. Employees reporting directly to the faculty managements totaled 829 individuals.
Management and Asset Management
In the course of the time period between 2011 and 2015, the University of Debrecen received the highest annual average of 11% of the state subsidies allocated for institutions of higher education by the Hungarian state, followed closely by the Budapest-based
Eötvös Lóránd Tudományegyetem at the second place and
Szegedi Tudományegyetem ranked third.
Within the HUF 104.8 billion total amount of revenues in 2015, the ratio of the state subsidy received by UD for supporting state-subsidized students and for covering other specific fixed costs was 22%, which has displayed a continuously decreasing tendency in the past few years, while the proportion of the university’s own revenues has significantly increased. The overall figure of the University of Debrecen’s own revenues within the total of the expenditure amounted to 18.5% in 2015. During the course of the past 5 years, the amount of the university’s own revenues has increased from year to year, by a total of 11.63% altogether. In 2015, there were up to 200 individual projects running, financed from various sources of support at the University of Debrecen, with a total budget of HUF 17.5 billion. More than half of the current projects are financed from domestic sources, but there are also quite a few projects financed directly by the EU (113 OTKA, 9 KTIA, 22 Operative Programs, 31 directly EU financed projects, 1 foundation, 9 other domestic and 10 other international projects). The largest part of the total budget of projects running in 2015 (51%) is made up of Operative programs financed by the EU or co-financed from domestic sources. Financing 16.7% of the projects has come from OTKA, 16.6% from KTIA, 10.7% directly from the EU.
The University of Debrecen has been granted support from calls announced in 2015 in the value of HUF 2.5 billion, ahead of
Pécsi Tudományegyetem (HUF 2.251 billion),
Miskolci Egyetem (HUF 2.123 billion),
Szegedi Tudományegyetem (HUF 2.078 billion) and
Kaposvári Egyetem (HUF 1.522 billion) in the top five. The major part of these projects would aim at raising the quality of higher education.
In the past 5 years, the amount of the assets of the University of Debrecen has grown by HUF 24.87 billion, while in 2015 it was HUF 103.56 billion, which means an increase of 31.6%. In 2015, the value of invested assets was HUF 75 838 million, which constituted 73.2% of the value of the total assets. The majority of invested assets were material assets (like real estate, machinery, vehicles, and breeding stock), the total value of which was HUF 75 092 million.
Infrastructure
The area of the 363 buildings of the University of Debrecen is more than 500 thousand square meters and is located at 94 postal addresses. This infrastructure is used in an average year by almost 30 thousand university students, 2800 grade and high school students, more than 6300 employees, 95 thousand inpatients and 887 thousand outpatients, which is more than one million people altogether. Such a quantity of built infrastructure requires continuous efforts of maintenance, for which reason the university invested HUF 34.7 billion into construction and HUF 4.5 billion into restoration of buildings between 2010 and 2015. The most significant investments of the past two years included the construction of the Sports Science Educational Center and the completion of
Szaktanácsadási Központ [Consultancy Center] in Nyíregyháza as well as the reconstruction of several buildings in the area of the clinics.
The 14 faculties on 7 campuses occupy more than 150 thousand square meters. There are 840 venues used here directly for higher education activities, including 100 lecture halls, 530 practice and seminar rooms, 60 computer rooms, 135 laboratories and language labs and 15 gyms. Beside the laboratories used for educational purposes, the University of Debrecen also has 500 research labs.
In the public spaces of the buildings of the university, there are more than 130 “hot-zone” locations with free Wi-Fi access. University life and performing operative tasks are helped by numerous IT applications, some of which have been developed locally. At present, there are 22 such applications used at the institution.
Source: Institutional Development Plan of the University of Debrecen for 2016–2020
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