To save work and reduce costs, the UMCG is developing a simplified financial model. The faculty council of medical sciences has expressed concerns, as funding for education and research hasn’t been fully covered yet, but has nonetheless approved the plan.
The current method of distributing revenues at the UMCG is decades old and no longer aligns with its present-day responsibilities. Additionally, there is insufficient transparency regarding where the budget is allocated.
The new model consists of a fixed base allocation per organisational unit—covering 90 percent of the funding—and a performance-based component of roughly 10 percent, depending on research and educational achievements. This replaces the old, complex system in which departments internally charged each other, saving additional costs.
Base funding is determined by the number of staff members in a given organisational unit, with a focus on the number of PhD candidates per faculty member. Professors without PhD candidates will not be eligible for base research funding.
Disadvantaging postdocs and technicians
The UMCG’s faculty council has expressed concerns about the plans in a written response, as certain staff members could be left without their own source of funding. ‘If you use this as a distribution formula, you disadvantage postdocs and technicians, for example’, explains council member and professor of experimental oncology Frank Kruyt. ‘It creates an incentive that impacts the postdoc population.’
Wiro Niessen, dean of medical sciences, says it’s not that black and white. ‘The funding is, of course, intended for the entire group, not just the PhD candidates’, he says. He also emphasises that adjustments can still be made to the model: ‘We can also include external funding levels, the number of citations, and the number of completed PhDs per group as parameters.’
Teaching workload hours
The council is also advocating for equal compensation for teaching duties. These are currently calculated based on so-called teaching workload hours (dbu), but these do not have the same value across the UMCG. For example, a one-hour lecture in the medicine programme translates to 1.5 dbu, whereas the same lecture in movement sciences is worth 4 dbu.
‘We don’t currently know the maximum number of dbu’s that can be registered per activity or who will be responsible for monitoring this’, says vice-chair Lizayra Dassen (student faction ProMed). This lack of clarity, she warns, carries the risk of escalating education costs.
Trial period
Despite its concerns, the council has given a positive recommendation on the proposal. It emphasises the importance of ‘establishing fair and appropriate criteria for education and research that acknowledge the effort involved. (…) A transparent financial model will support this.’
The new model will not be implemented immediately but will run parallel to the current system until the end of the year as a trial. This will allow the organisation to assess how the new funding structure impacts operations. However, the faculty council considers this trial period too short, as it expects multiple adjustments will be needed to ensure each organisational unit receives the appropriate funding.