Union Gate

Labor unions TEK and SEFE which represents Engineers, Architects and Economists have released their higher education policy papers. Both unions would iniate tuition fees in Finland for students outside EU/ETA countries and TEK would go even further with tuition fees for all nationalities, even for Finnish students. TEK has lame reasoning regarding the tuition fees; Finland should have fees since every other country has them also. TEK wants every foreigner to pay fees and to do this without breaking EU legistlation also Finns would have to pay them. To enable this, TEK proposes to use the UK model where domestic students get their semester fees subvented through some stipend organizations. Brilliant, the UK model has worked really well there! (Not) This model leads to greed and exploitation on univesities behalf just like it has happened with housing benefits in Finland, the rents have basically risen exactly with the amount of govermental housing benefit.

Aallonhuiput strongly disapproves the statements of TEK and SEFE regarding the tuition fees.

• First of all, tuition fees would even further the equality gap between doctoral students and undergraduate students.
• Second, the oft used reasoning that free education can’t be high quality is utter nonsense. There are no evindence that Finnish Higher Education would have low quality, on the contrary, many students that have gone through exchange period say that Finnish teaching is superb comparing to other countries. My personal experiences support this statement at least regarding UK and Germany.
• Third, tuition fees have crashed the number of international students in countries previously with free education and only through long and expensive stipend system they have managed to get a part of the students back.
• Last, it has been shown that the students who after graduation stay in Finland to work will pay enough in taxes to balance the cost of educating the students who won’t stay in Finland. If support for international students would be better, I’m sure more of them would stay in Finland when the checks would turn very much in Finlands favor also considering just tax €.