The UPV/EHU will approve its 2022-2025 Strategic Plan next Tuesday, the roadmap that will mark the path to follow in the next four years. This was announced this Friday by the rector of the University of the Basque Country, Eva Ferreira, who participated in the Euskadi Tribune of the Forum Europe held in Bilbao, where she announced that one of the main challenges that the only public university has set itself of Euskadi is to attract more foreign postgraduate students, one of the areas in which there is a clear “room for improvement”.
The document, which has been prepared in recent months, establishes the need to increase the offer of master’s degrees and doctorates in English. Without going so far as to say that it is one of the pending subjects, the head of the academic institution has pointed out that undergraduate training is “stable” and covers all branches of knowledge, but in postgraduate training “it is necessary to work for greater internationalization of the offer». “We have to be more attractive, more open, especially bet on English,” she slipped.
In recent years, the presence of young foreigners has grown like wildfire and the University of the Basque Country remains the center of the country with the most ‘Erasmus Mundu’ programmes, a total of 8. However, and now that after the pandemic levels of international mobility prior to covid have been recovered, Ferreira has assured that “we want to increase the offer even more in these years. We are not satisfied.”
The intensification of dual training, which offers university students to combine their studies with paid internships in companies to get closer to the world of work, is also another of the strategies that will be backed in the next four years and that the rector has emphasized at the event, which took place at the Hotel Ercilla and is sponsored by the BBK Foundation.
Another axis that will guide this plan will be research. In this regard, Ferreira recalled that one of every two patents registered in the community come from the UPV/EHU and that the Basque public university maintains 260 groups financed by calls from the Basque Government, a close relationship with companies related to science and technology and has set up four of its own centers with stable lines of research: the advanced manufacturing center, dedicated to technology; the PIE, the Plentzia Maritime Station, focused on marine biology; ITS, the center for artificial intelligence applied to linguistics, and the EHU Quantum Center, which will carry out research on quantum physics and will be officially presented this Monday.
Achievements and objectives that give international prestige to the University and with which its managers aspire to improve its position in the famous Shanghai ranking. The UPV/EHU remains among the top 400, but “it is not a dream that we can climb positions”, Ferreira pointed out. “We are getting better and better, but the other universities are too, and to advance positions you have to go faster than the rest.”
Other current issues related to the UPV/EHU were addressed at the meeting, such as the state of the accounts, which last year received an extra financial injection from the Department of Education to close the gap of 12 million generated by the pandemic and by the increase energy expenditure, among other reasons. In this sense, the rector has assured that the last budget year will not close with a deficit, although she avoided revealing more details and limited herself to saying that “the 2021 settlement will be approved this Tuesday in the Governing Council and that it ends well”. Likewise, she showed her confidence that the works of the Faculty of Medicine and Nursing of Basurto start “before the beginning of summer.”
Ferreira presented his plans before a plural room, made up of representatives from the educational, political and business sectors. The rector of the academic institution has been accompanied by her predecessor in office, Nekane Balluerka; the rector of the University of Deusto, José María Guibert, and the vice-minister for Universities and Research, Adolfo Morais. Likewise, the president of the General Assemblies of Bizkaia, Ana Otadui; the Councilor for Euskera and Education of the Bilbao City Council, Koldo Narbaiza; the spokesperson for the Municipal Council of EH Bildu, Jone Goirizelaia; the regional deputy for Social Action, Sergio Murillo; the general secretary of the PSE in Bizkaia, Mikel Torres, the mayor of San Sebastián, Eneko Goia, and representatives of companies such as Iberdrola, Tecnalia, Velatia or Idom, among others.
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