Most things are going very well at the Faculty of Social Sciences, both in research and in teaching. Some highlights from Vice-Dean Lars’ presentation of the faculty’s perspective analysis to the University Board in May show that we have a high success rate for applications for external funding from both the EU and the Research Council of Norway, as well as strong scores in international rankings and evaluations. On the education side, our study programmes attract a good and stable number of applicants, we make good use of our teaching capacity, and our students work hard. In recent years, our credit production has increased more than the growth in student numbers. Together with the Faculty of Humanities, we also have the University of Oslo’s most efficient administration, with the fewest technical and administrative full-time equivalents per academic full-time equivalent. At the Faculty of Social Sciences, we therefore have a highly competent and dedicated staff in research, teaching and administration, who individually and collectively contribute to the strong results we are achieving.
This gives us a solid basis for meeting the challenges now facing us and the entire higher education sector, particularly on the education side. For example, we are currently in a period of tighter finances. From the peak year of 2019 to 2025, the real value of the faculty’s allocation from the Ministry (KD allocation) has fallen by around 7 per cent. It is therefore especially important that we make the best possible use of resources in all our teaching activities.
We are also facing challenges related to high dropout rates, especially among first-year students in our bachelor’s programmes. Despite a positive trend in dropout figures since the 2020 cohort, almost 40 per cent of the 2024 cohort have still dropped out during their first three semesters. This affects the faculty’s credit production, which is the most important factor in the calculation of our performance-based income in the new allocation model.
I would nonetheless say that the greatest challenge we face is the rapid development of artificial intelligence. In its preliminary report from December 2025, the Malthe-Sørensen Committee put into words the paradigm shift the AI revolution represents for academia: – in a world with AI, we must “ensure that students learn well and can demonstrate what they have learned, either in spite of, or by virtue of, having access to tools that can carry out what they themselves are supposed to do” (p. 8). We therefore must think anew about what we teach our students, how we teach it, and how we assess and verify their learning outcomes. If, as a sector, we fail in integrating AI into higher education, – “higher education risks becoming irrelevant to society, and the aim of meeting future competence needs will not be fulfilled” (p. 9).
This is a formidable challenge, and I am firmly convinced that collaboration is the key to meeting it. If each of us, individually and on our own, is to work out how best to integrate AI into our own teaching, it will simply take too long. We all need to be creative and innovative in our own teaching, but we must also share our ideas and experiences with one another so that we can learn from each other more effectively than we have done in the past. We must engage in collaboration in the form of, for example, brainstorming about teaching design, organisation, learning methods and forms of assessment. We must take part in generous sharing of experiences – both what has worked and what has not. We must be willing both to teach others and to learn from others.
We already have a good culture of collaboration in our faculty, in both research and teaching, and we already have many small and large, formal and informal arenas for this kind of collaboration – which we now need to make full use of. But this kind of collaboration takes time, and it must be prioritised in a busy working day.
The first opportunity to prioritise collegiality and collaboration in teaching is the faculty’s autumn seminar in the Forum for studiespørsmål (Forum for Study Affairs), which will take place on 14 October at Tøyen Hovedgård. We will be discussing when and how we should teach students basic academic skills such as writing, reading, literature search, referencing, critical thinking and similar competences in a world with AI.
The seminar is open to everyone at the faculty who is interested. The registration deadline is 5 October. See you there!
- Read more about the seminar in Norwegian and register here: programme and registration form.