Research confirms a high workload in higher education

Once every three years the Ministry of the Interior carries out major research (in Dutch) into the level of job satisfaction among employees in the public sector. Forty thousand respondents, of which 16,000 work in education, filled in the 2019 survey.

Their responses were striking, and not in a positive sense. The high number of agreements to statements such as ‘When I get home from work, I am completely exhausted’ and ‘When I get home they need to leave me alone’ from employees in education was startling.

Completely exhausted
After the responses were published, the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) requested researchers to delve into their dataset. There they saw that almost two thirds of university, university medical centre and university of applied sciences staff experience their workload as high to extremely high.

Teachers and scientists experience this to a greater extent than support staff, with percentages of 72 and 52 respectively. One of three scientists feels ‘completely exhausted’ at the end of their working day. Supervisors experience high workloads more often than employees without management tasks.

The researchers also saw a clear pattern among scientific personnel: the older the person, the more they experienced their workload as high. This applies in particular to the 45 to 55 year age group, about 80% of whom find it high.

Not new
The concerns about the workload in higher education and research are not new. The WOinActie (higher education in action) protest movement went to the Labour Inspectorate earlier this year while last summer, University of Utrecht students demonstrated (in Dutch) by drawing thousands of red squares in a display of solidarity with their overworked teachers.

“Didn’t @WOinActie come to this conclusion a long time ago? And put forward solutions?” asked Leiden University Professor Remco Breuker on Twitter. “And the Rathenau Institute, SoFoKleS, KNAW, De Jonge Akademie …” added philosophy teacher Carlo Ierna.

Valuable
None of this has escaped the VSNU, says spokesperson Wesley Boer. “As early as 2016 we asked if we could use the results to assess the status of our sector. For years now we have seen that the workload is high and is only increasing.”

Boer says that the new assessment is valuable. The figures show the proportion between younger and older employees, scientific and support employees, and supervisors and staff in how they experience their workload.

Cold comfort
There is good news too though. Of the university teachers, 85% is satisfied/very satisfied with their job, almost 80% is satisfied with their colleagues, and 65% is satisfied with their organisation.

One cold comfort is that the workload experienced in primary and secondary education is even higher with 72% and 70% respectively experiencing a high/extremely high workload.

HOP, Evelien Flink