Following legislation passed by the Danish Parliament in 2000, colleges offering medium-cycle professional higher education started merging into more comprehensive centres for higher education (CVUs).
CVUs were a new type of institution developed with the aim of strengthening professionally oriented types of higher education and creating new possibilities for further education and training. The centres were also meant to be innovative bodies in the field of knowledge development.
The CVU sector consisted of more than 20 CVUs encompassing approximately 100 colleges, placed under the Ministry of Education. In 2008 the CVUs and most of the remaining individual medium-cycle HEIs merged to form 8 University Colleges.
Basically, CVUs could be organised in two different ways according to the level of integration between the institutions participating:
1. Independent institutions part of a centre for higher education
In this case, medium-cycle professional higher education institutions founded a new institution together, a centre for higher education (CVU), but remained independent, temporarily.
This was called conditional CVU approval.
2. Partner institutions part of a centre for higher education
In this case, the institutions merged into a CVU as a joint legal and financial entity from the beginning.
This was called unconditional CVU approval.
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