Students as the pulse

Students make KU Leuven a unique and dynamic community. Our university has the largest student population in the Flemish educational landscape. With 23% international students and PhD students from 154 different countries, our university is a meeting place for young people from all over the world. They help make KU Leuven a diverse and inspiring community. More than 30% of our students are on one of the 12 campuses outside Leuven.

On a global level, we are currently facing a large number of challenges, such as increasing geopolitical tensions, climate change, the unfair exploitation of raw materials in the Global South, political pressure on human rights and international law, and the dangers of new technologies to our privacy and copyrights. We are convinced that whoever chooses KU Leuven as a student, employee or researcher should be able to play an impactful role in these areas.

The success of our courses lies in the quality of our education, its organisation and the financial conditions we create for it. The accessibility of our courses is crucial to preparing as many young people as possible for the challenges of tomorrow.

1. We recognise that the current format of the academic year is suboptimal. The period between the end of the academic year and the start of a new one is very short and puts a lot of pressure on everyone closely involved in teaching. One solution could be to temporarily increase the capacity of employees by, for example, working with flying squads/staff (a model that already exists today) to support the start-up of the academic year (such as starter days). A second problem lies in the long period between the first semester and the resit in the third examination period, which is not optimal for knowledge retention. To address this, we need to work on solutions that are evidence-based, and do so in close consultation with all stakeholders and especially the students. Moreover, an entire rearrangement of the academic calendar would mean a large-scale operation that may require more than one administrative period, and that can only succeed in consultation with the Association and in consultation with the other Flemish universities. If all actors deem it opportune to reopen this discussion or to implement certain optimisations, students should definitely be included and heard from the beginning, just like all other stakeholders on whom this intervention will undoubtedly have an impact.
2. Besides existing guidelines around the use of AI in education, there should be a concrete learning line within each course at KU Leuven to teach students how to use AI efficiently and correctly under controlled conditions. We consider this a form of AI coaching. ChatGPT, Co-pilot and other packages offer ample opportunities for users. However, inappropriate use sometimes makes texts public, which often raises legal and ethical issues. Good coaching around prompt engineering, where students can generate the desired output with the right prompts (i.e. the right questions), is essential here. Currently, students in many faculties already sign a kind of honour code: they may/must use AI, but must indicate how and where they have used it, so that lecturers know which parts are authentic or not. However, there is a need for skills training, as we build into various courses for statistics, for example. Currently, there are ad hoc workshops around AI, or specific curricula developed. A more structural approach in the existing curriculum – either via a more in-depth course component, or via separate modules, or even a broad subject at the level of the groups or of the entire university, to be developed in cooperation with the Expert commission GenAI, the libraries and/or Leuven.AI – is needed. We should also investigate how AI can be used more concretely to better support vulnerable students or students with certain learning disadvantages. After all, AI can be successfully used to improve the learning process and studies suggest that students can particularly benefit from it. We need to make a focused effort to ensure that KU Leuven becomes a forerunner in this. If deployed properly, AI can also allow our study supervisors to free up time: that is extra time they can spend on the most complex and/or urgent needs.
3. Education should be research-driven and provide in-depth knowledge and learning experiences to prepare students for future challenges. We therefore offer our students education that integrates knowledge about societal challenges into its curriculum. And we go a step further: we want all students to learn about sustainability in their curriculum. This complements the range of excellent programmes in fields such as sustainability and digitalisation. We implement educational innovations insofar as they are demonstrably efficient. Efficiency is not necessarily demonstrable in quality improvement and maintaining the same quality withefficiency improvement is also profit. This can be done, for example, through interactive work formats that stimulate critical thinking or digital tools that support efficient feedback….
4. We address the availability of affordable quality housing for students in close cooperation with the Student Services Department (Stuvo), the City of Leuven and the General Management Services. Affordable student accommodation such as in KU Leuven’s residences is essential to allow students to fully concentrate on their studies and personal development, without financial stress. Significant efforts have already been made in recent years through additional purchases and building projects but further steps remain necessary.  After all, the average price for a rooming house has increased dramatically in recent years, notably by 100 euros over a 4-year period (2020-2024) (source: Stadim’s Room Compass). A student room now costs an average of 575 euros per month. The university should help keep the prices, availability and quality of student rooms under control by ensuring that there are enough rooms available in (subsidised and non-subsidised) student residences. We will continue to invest in the supply of student rooms. After all, studies show that more (new) available housing causes prices of existing housing to fall. Also, residences currently often mean a lifeline for many families. Currently, about 15% of student housing consists of residences (about 7,000 rooms), and 85% of private lots. The 15% share of residences must absolutely be safeguarded to avoid practices like in our neighbouring countries (the Netherlands) where room prices are moving towards €800. In addition, we must focus even more on the quality of the rooms. Rooms with a K label meet the quality requirements of KU Leuven or the city of Leuven and appear on Kotwijs. We commit to withdrawing the K label if landlords are guilty of discrimination in allocating lots.
5. We are committed to the safety and efficiency of mobility to and on the campuses. The availability of public transport is extremely unreliable in many locations, commuter students often feel excluded and the state of the frequently used cycle paths in and around Leuven and on the campuses is wretched in some places. This is where we as a university, in dialogue with De Lijn and the relevant authorities, need to take measures to restore and optimise mobility on the non-Leuven campuses. We not only continue to advocate for the tram bus to be installed between the station and Hoog Kortrijk, but also try to come up with better mobility solutions in Diepenbeek and Geel, for example, together with our partner colleges.
6. We want to pay more attention to the socio-economic problems of vulnerable students, in which KU Leuven can play a greater supporting role. Thus, we will roll out well-functioning local initiatives such as Stuvo’s Avicenna career coaching project university-wide, in consultation with all stakeholders. In the medium and longer term, we can play an additional role here by supporting sociological research, by exchanging experiences via international collaborations and by playing an active role in regional, national and European debates on inequality and poverty.
7. Together with LOKO-recognised student circles and free associations, we are thinking about how to make the associations future-proof: what is the role of a student association, what support (financial, legal, etc.) is needed for this and by whom should this support be provided?