The Finnish school system is nice, until you wanna go to college/university.
I think higher education in Finland isn't anything special, if you actually want a quality education you'll have to go abroad (like the actually successful people do here anyway). Even the arguably best schools aren't that good. People mostly coast through them once they get in and just want the piece of paper at the end. Good parties though.
Years later in the work force they'll wake up and see they barely make more money then an electrician with their fancy degree because of the insane tax policies here. What's the point of having a nice degree if you're still gonna have a moderately low salary compared to other European countries?
Small tidbit of info:
In Finland students don't pay for studying. Instead, the government pays money to the students for studying.
I've heard this is not the case in US.
This is a very generalizing argument. Universities are free (paid by taxes obviously) in Finland, but there is no such thing like what you describe. In here the only prerequisite is that you have finished high school, then you can take the entry exams.. It's also not uncommon for someone to go into a university later in their life. My cs courses had a good bunch of people in their fifties re-educating themselves.
Finnish students get allowance from the government for the duration of their studies (max ~60 months) and get government backed cheap loans which they start paying back after their studies.
My own experience is that there are people from very varying backgrounds in the Finnish universities.
This is probably true for Finland aswell, i was a student in Helsinki (I have lived in the helsinki metropolitan area for the most part of my life) from 2006-2012, and as any kid in his early 20s i wanted to have my own appartment.
So my rent was 650 euros/month, and adding other costs the monthly cost for living was probably over 1200 euros/month.
So school was free, and we also get a student benefit from the government for 9 months each year, the benefit is for everyone studying and its about 450 euros/month.
So as you see i also had to work at the same time, which was fine. I had a job for the entire time i studied, and got a decent salary.
Now, heres the catch. By some idiotic law i cannot make more than 9000 euros per year. If o make more i have to pay back the student benefit.
Why? I pay taxes, i get the points in school? So the government is telling me: DONT WORK!
This law resuts in people dont working, or working just a little bit and ending up taking student loans, and when they are finished studying many have loads for 1000s of euros.
As a student work experience is as valuable as the knowledge from school, i would not hire anyone without work experience, and this is where the finnish government fails.
Here in Finland, our education is also free (even for foreigners), but we are now starting to put limits on certain things, like the number of tuition free degrees you can have.
There is now talks of charging foreigners and even introducing basic fees for citizens.
Education is important here because the labour market salaries are strictly based on your qualifications and experience, not your experience or ability alone.
This is why I hope Finland never starts to charge for tuition fees, unless they do away with the qualification based pay scale.
In the future, I think free online education could replace paid education as long as the government recognised the achievements of so called 'self-taught' students. I realise you couldn't do this in full for just any profession though.
Finland has free college education. Mainly for that reason, the future profitability of a specific discipline doesn't appear to be a major factor in how young Finns choose their majors (as evidenced by the enduring huge popularity of objectively unprofitable disciplines such as media and design).
It seems to me that those that become teachers in Finland have chosen the career fairly early on. It's a vocational thing. Money doesn't influence the decision, but of course there is the financial baseline that teaching is a stable job that offers an extraordinarily long summer vacation (something like 11 weeks, fully paid).
I was estimating the costs of providing the education, not the prices of getting it. (The latter would be €0/year in Finland.) If a university can charge more, it can usually find a way to spend the extra money.
School is free here too. Most people don’t go to college in either Finland or the US. (It’s slightly higher in the US.) But the average person who does go to college graduates with about $30,000 in debt. Which they will make up for given higher salary and lower taxes in the US within a few years. The median post-tax disposable income is $15,000 per year higher in the US than Finland.
I guess if you're a year/two into a course in America you'd probably have $20,000 in debt to pay. If you have to pay it without graduating then you'd probably think you'd wasted the money - so you'd be likely to finish the degree to make sure you got "something" out of it.
By contrast here in Finland education is free, so it's a lot easier for people to start courses, and if it didn't suit then drop out. Or move cities, and get a job.
Where education is free I'd expect both more people to sign up to it, but also more people to drop out. Or take 10+ years to eventually get their degree whilst continuing to work.
I get that paying for your education is pretty bad, but as someone who is enjoying free bachelor level education in Finland I can tell that the amount of quality teachers is pretty low, our small campus has maybe 4 teachers I'd consider competent.
I'm also the kind of guy who'd enjoy extracurricular clubs, but sadly out of the few hundred students at our campus total of 3 of us (me included) are interested in club activities and only student body event that gets more than 10 people attending is yearly "drinking cruise".
I can't say for sure that these two things are related, but I have a hunch that since people aren't actually paying for their education most don't take it as seriously and thus people just do the bare minimum they can get away with. Or maybe it's just the general level of education which is so much lower nothing feels "real" at least considering how much I read U.S. based engineering students whine about...
It's the same in Finland, at least in universities. If you don't pass your courses, the state stops paying the student benefits[1], but you can stay at the university. There is another, very low number of courses you need to pass every year in order to stay in, but that is very low indeed, it's only meant to keep registers clean of people not studying at all.
1: That's right, Finns are paid to study. I think students in most of the Nordic countries are.
Monthly allowance (around 400-500EUR in total) and free university education (classes and labs are free, you have to buy or loan the books) are the main characteristics of Finnish university system. Student loans play only a small part. Many people in my student generation didn't even take them, even if they are more or less risk free loans.
"The state also provides grants of as much as 500 euros ($670) a month plus meal support and loans of as much as 400 euros a month. While education is a safe haven for students, the economy suffers when they put off joining the job market and don’t have skills the labor market needs, said Hannu Kaseva, an economist at ETLA research institute in Helsinki."
The first part sounds like classic labour market whining about having to compete for employees. Improve your working conditions and compensation and individuals will choose your organization instead of education. If organizations require a particular skill, why do they not develop it themselves, why should the individual take the risk for their benefit?
I too reside in a jurisdiction that fails to train a sufficient number of its own health care workers, a problem that the Finns have. I suspect the Finnish schools are full, as are ours, they and we just failed to create enough seats.
I consider not having to work to survive to be a pinnacle of humanity. Health care is already free of charge in most of the modern world without having to prove one's worth to anyone, why not extend that to food/water/shelter/tertiary education?
Maybe it's because all of our schools are public?
For example higher ed. providers are funded based on enrollment and rate of graduation. If someone does not graduate, significant chunk (20-30%) of money won't be paid at all. This creates some incentive for the institution to actually guide and see that people don't fall through all kinds of cracks. I guess it's necessary when there is no ordinary paying customer relationship involved.
They could have earned an equally useful degree for less than a quarter of the price in some European country like Germany or Finland where university is really cheap even for non-citizens.
One, why tax graduates? In other EU countries, free is free as in beer and you never need to pay anyone anything, for higher education.
Two, why double-tax the future workforce? I mean, they'll pay taxes once they start working anyway. And obviously, those who do go into higher education will end up making more money, and therefore pay more taxes. The state will get back its penny'orth alright, so what's the point of adding a cherry on top?
Full disclosure- I'm from Greece originally but graduated from a UK university, and am repaying a tuition free loan, to which I was entitled as an EU citizen; so personally I benefit from the system (because I'd probably not be eligible for free education anyway). It still doesn't make sense to me.
To some extent I think people just underestimate what education costs. Sweden pays ~€40k to educate an engineer (5 year, B.Sc + M.Sc). On top of that there is another ~€20k in student benefits to the student and ~€40k in a government backed student loan (for books and living costs).
I think higher education in Finland isn't anything special, if you actually want a quality education you'll have to go abroad (like the actually successful people do here anyway). Even the arguably best schools aren't that good. People mostly coast through them once they get in and just want the piece of paper at the end. Good parties though.
Years later in the work force they'll wake up and see they barely make more money then an electrician with their fancy degree because of the insane tax policies here. What's the point of having a nice degree if you're still gonna have a moderately low salary compared to other European countries?
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