No restriction of face-to-face teaching due to energy situation

"We will not restrict our teaching operations in order to save costs," emphasized University President Prof. Dr. Ute Clement before the start of the lecture period. The first classes begin Oct. 17 at a time of sharply higher energy prices. "Students have experienced many disadvantages in the past pandemic years. We want to do everything we can to ensure that they can continue to study well and in attendance in Kassel."

The university wants to achieve the political target of using 20 percent less energy by implementing technical measures, but also with an awareness campaign. In it, employees and students are asked to help save energy. In return, the university will not extend the Christmas break or impose other restrictions on teaching and operations. But the university is not only acting on the consumption side: in order to largely phase out the use of gas, for example, it has shut down its combined heat and power plant and replaced it with district heating.

After years in which the focus was on coping with enormous increases in the number of students, in the future the university wants to concentrate more on support and the accompaniment of individual courses of study in order to lead students from different backgrounds and life situations to successful degrees. According to Clement, classroom teaching, cleverly combined with digital offerings, is essential for this. The university is investing almost 3 million euros to integrate digital offerings into classroom teaching following the experiences of the Corona period. To name just one example, a virtual construction site is being programmed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where students can learn construction management methods and processes in a digital environment.

"After the Corona semesters, we seem to have lost some young people," Ute Clement noted, referring to the drop in the number of returns (enrollees who continue their studies). "There are indications that this affects, to a notable extent, students who were already enrolled for longer than the standard period of study. The current labor market with high demand for workers may have offered a good alternative there for one or the other."

According to preliminary figures, 22,924 students are enrolled at the University of Kassel in the upcoming winter semester (in 21/22, there were 23,699). 19,018 people have re-registered (19,781). 4,313 young people are studying in their first semester (4,443). By contrast, the number of first-time enrollments (i.e., those people who are studying at a university for the first time ever) rose to 2,344 (2,173), despite the fact that there were about 250 fewer high school graduates in Kassel alone in 2022 than in the previous year. All enrollment figures are preliminary. Exact data is expected in mid-November.

Ute Clement announced the establishment of new degree programs for the coming years: "We will expand our range of courses and adapt them to the expectations of the younger generation. For example, ten new courses of study related to sustainability will be created by the new Kassel Institute for Sustainability, which was officially launched last September." In this unique center, up to 17 professorships will conduct research and teach along the lines of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in the future. The first professorships have already been filled. The degree program in International Language and Cultural Mediation in Romance Studies has already been launched this semester. It offers a binational degree in cooperation with the University of Angers.

The Kassel University President, who recently also assumed the role of spokesperson for the Hessian universities, appealed to the state of Hesse to continue to provide adequate funding in times of inflation, rising energy costs, digital transformation and increasingly heterogeneous student cohorts. It is important to offer students strong learning environments, differentiated learning paths and intensive learning support. At the same time, he said, universities need freedom in research and support in the transfer of scientific findings to society.

Press contact:

Sebastian Mense
University of Kassel
Communications, Press and Public Relations
Tel.: +49 561 804-1961
E-mail: presse[at]uni-kassel[dot]de
www.uni-kassel.de