The main discussion items in the last English Bachelor’s Programme Committee meeting of the year (7.11.2024) were changes in the university’s tuition fee and scholarship policy. More specifically, we discussed the proposed change that to get the Aalto Excellence Scholarship for the master’s degree, the applicant would have had to have it already for their bachelor’s degree. This was not mandatory before. In addition, to get the scholarship the applicant would need a bachelor’s degree with a GPA of 3.5. Before 3.8 GPA was required. The reason for these changes is that the university does not have the resources to pay the current amount of scholarships. On the other hand, in the AllWell? survey it was found that many students are stressed about maintaining a high GPA and need to retake courses because of that which is then possibly delaying their graduation. This is why the GPA requirement was proposed to be decreased.
However, this was not a final decision yet and these matters were to be confirmed by the end of this year. The committee did not fully agree with this proposal. One committee member thought that things should be done the other way around: the GPA requirement should be increased dramatically and that we should not take into account whether the applicant has had a scholarship for the bachelor’s degree when granting one for the master’s degree. This was probably the loudest opinion which not everyone agreed with though, but the representative from the university promised to send this feedback to the decision makers. Overall, the committee was concerned about these cuts to scholarships since there is a risk they will affect the amount of people applying to Aalto negatively. Already this year the number of applicants to the English Bachelor’s Programmes was not increasing from last year. The goal would be to get more people from abroad but people were worried this would not help that.
There is more information about proposed and upcoming changes to scholarships and tuition fees here. In the meeting, we also tried to voice our concern about how the Quantum Labs course was organized this year, but the only solution we got as an answer was to send to course feedback. :D Since this was the last meeting, this was also the last meeting summary from me. My experience was that these meetings were surprisingly fast paced and sometimes even rushed, so for the next year’s student representatives I would give as advice to be prepared for the meetings by reading the agendas and appendices very carefully.