Copenhagen Business School (CBS) has been hit hard by the government’s recently announced austerity requirements that ask universities and colleges to save 2 percent annually on expenses.

As a consequence, CBS will be forced to cut 2,700 student places by 2019 and reduce the intake of new students by 15 percent.

Master’s blow
In the future, CBS will accept fewer master’s degree students as educating them costs more than educating bachelor students.

“They [the students] will have to study somewhere else, but their chance of getting a job afterwards will be lower,” Per Holten-Andersen, the president of CBS, told Berlingske.

Reputation at risk
According to Holten-Andersen, CBS graduates are currently more likely to get a job and higher wages than others, but that could change.

“It will not be the same at CBS. We have built up an extremely great reputation abroad, but we now risk losing it,” Holten-Andersen noted.

Already hit hard
According to the president, CBS gets less state funding per student than other Danish universities and earns more from its education programs than research.

Moreover, the university has just recently implemented another savings plan of 60 million kroner that will start in 2017.

Among world’s best
Meanwhile, the CBS course ‘Business and Management’ placed among the world’s top ten, according to the latest QS World University Rankings.

“We are obviously delighted about the results, especially as all the other universities have a three-to-ten-times higher budget per student,” Sven Bislev, the vice dean of education at CBS, told Finans.

Despite low budget
CBS spends about 55,000 kroner per student annually, while many of the foreign universities spend up to 300,000 kroner, according to Bislev.

Another of its courses, ‘Accounting and Finance’, also ranked highly in the international comparison, taking a place among the top 50.

The annual QS World University Rankings cover more than 800 of the top universities in the world and bases its results on six key performance indicators, including academic reputation and research publications.