In a time when it's a bit tight for communities, it's great to be able to launch a quiz game from Box Quiz about High School, which is one of the absolutely fantastic characteristics of Denmark. Have you been to college? And what exactly is a college?
It is a kind of boarding school for adults who live and study together and every day deal with something they are passionate about. It can be, for example, art, literature, music, song, theater and drama, food and culinary experiences, philosophy, yes, everything between heaven and earth. It does not require any special prerequisites to attend college. And there is no exam after a college stay. Every year, more than 30,000 adults from 17 1/2 years and up take the approx. 70 colleges around Denmark, and many experience coming home as new people, with expanded horizons, new friends for life and fantastic experiences and lifelong memories. The cornerstones of the colleges' offer and dissemination are democratic education and life and public education, even if many of the colleges have a predominance of cultural subjects.
The colleges are a Danish invention, which is based on NFS Grundtvig's thoughts on national education. The first college opened in 1844 in Rødding. That is why the high schools were able to hold an impressive 175th anniversary in 2019. There is a lot of singing at the high schools, and the high school songbook forms the framework for lovely and liberating singing both morning, noon and evening. Every year on June 21, the longest day of the year, there is a singing marathon. On that day, the High School Songbook is sung from cover to cover, and it starts at 7 in the morning. The tradition started at Vartovkollegiet in 2009, and there is singing until the sun goes down in Vartov's Grønnegård.
How is the gender distribution at the colleges? Is it fifty fifty? No. There is a clear preponderance of women, and especially on the short courses there are often 70% women. From the beginning, the high schools were divided by gender, but in the 1940s, Engelsholm Højskole near Vejle broke with that tradition and became the first place where boys and girls were taught together.
One of the newest colleges is Roskilde Festivalens Højskole, which opened in 2019 in Roskilde with a wide range of exciting subjects within architecture, entrepreneurship and culture. Many colleges are surrounded by beautiful nature, but you can also go to college in the middle of Copenhagen. Johan Borup Højskolen is located by Frederiksholm's Canal in the heart of Copenhagen and a stone's throw from Christiansborg.
How much does it cost to go to university? The colleges receive state support and come under the Ministry of Culture, but if you are going to college, you have to expect to pay a lot yourself. It's not cheap, but you're also buying a kind of all-inclusive school stay. Most colleges have a reputation for cooking absolutely fantastic food, serving many meals during the day and cooking everything themselves in commercial kitchens, so no one goes to bed hungry.
If you haven't been to college yet, but maybe you've got a taste for it now, you can get even more information about the many fantastic colleges in Denmark in our quiz game about College, which was released in August 2020. Enjoy!
