Tuition fees

We've traditionally had free university in Finland, meaning that in practice students do not pay for their education. This system has essentially afforded equal opportunities for people regardless of socio-economic background to educate themselves in universities. Now, recently there's been talk of introducing tuition fees in Finland. This presentation made by a group doing a report for the government would suggest a yearly fee of 1000 euros per student, translating to an extra 250 million euros of income per year for the education system (calculations done by Helsingin Sanomat). The rationale behind this move would be to get students to graduate faster as well has help in hiring new faculty, and so on.

Technically the goals of this initiative sound good: who wouldn't want to graduate faster and have more faculty per student than before. However, this somewhat undermines the free education principle. Some people stand very firmly behind the principle, but I don't consider myself as much of a hardliner on this issue. From a practical standpoint, however, I'm am somewhat worried about this turn of events: if the system was working and someone could guarantee that the extra 250 million would be spent wisely and would in practice improve the quality of education, I wouldn't necessarily be that much against it. But I fear that the extra money wouldn't matter; it would be squandered on pointless exercises and real tangible value would fail to materialize for the students.

Aalto University, the merger between Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, and the University of Art and Design Helsinki, promised lots of new and unique opportunities for students. The jury is still out on this one, but as far as I'm concerned this seemed precisely like an exercise that could bring synergies via increased economies of scale: reducing overlapping functions and bureaucracy and refocusing the left over resources on improving quality. Instead my current feeling is that this isn't happening. I don't have any hard evidence, but I have a feeling that the bureaucracy has in fact increased and thus I'm not so sure throwing extra money helps. There's a saying that states that only when money runs out does the thinking start. So in practice as long as there is an abundance of resources nothing will really change as it doesn't really have to.

So based on this I would argue that the system shouldn't be rewarded with more resources before it can clearly demonstrate that it will not spend the resources on completely pointless work groups consisting of bureaucrats who just like to spend their time in glorified workshops in remote locations.

As for the tuition fees themselves, that's also somewhat of a difficult issue. On one hand I somewhat understand the logic of putting some pressure on students: if you want to study, you have to be confident enough in what your doing to put some money where your mouth is. But many students are already doing this as traditionally the state support for students hasn't been that great in Finland and students are often forced to take jobs on the side (as a curious side note, I argue that this habit of taking up extra work is especially good for engineering students who clearly benefit from the overlapping of school and work and are thus, in my opinion, better prepared to face future challenges when compared to being merely school educated and lacking all practical experience coming out of school).

From the point of view of an individual student the net effect isn't too different if you consider two options: 1) institute tuition fees or 2) reduce state support for students. The result is less money for the student, meaning more work or more loans. I am a proponent for the work-while-studying approach, but that's mainly in the cases where the work actually supports studies. In cases where the work is routine manual labor and doesn't really overlap with your studies, the benefits are not as many. And ultimately I'm not sure either approach is necessarily that good, despite the fact that provocatively enough I often do argue that students need to indeed be ready put up a bit more of a stake than merely saying that "Yeah, I'll graduate, maybe..."

So what should be done, then? I actually think that tuition fees shouldn't be instituted. I also don't think that student support from a financial standpoint should be increased either. I do, however, think that one thing where students could use support is with affordable housing. To an extent this mechanism is already in use as student housing is given to students for a certain period of time with the assumption that students will eventually graduate or then get kicked out of their apartments after some years. It's the cheap housing which then enables students to have slightly more cash with which to improve their lives, and more money can then be obtained via working or lending money from the bank.

But yeah, by no means is this a simple issue and the problems are very much real. However, I think that both the students and the government are coming at the problem in a way too hardliner way which to an extent frightens me. Schools don't deserve any more money as far as they're as fat as they currently are and tuition fees are a bad idea, but also giving students too much financial aid (as opposed to loans) is also somewhat questionable. The fact that students take quite long (~6-7 years, I would guess) to graduate may not necessarily be a bad thing, and the government should try to understand that point as well. As for the students whose studies drag on and on, I would argue that there's hardly any extra cost (after the already sunk costs) for the state as these people often don't attend lectures and classes and are merely trying to finish their thesis or do the last couple of exams and are thus hardly more than a few bits in a data system.

These were just my two cents on the subject from the top of my head, so again I reserve the right to change my view in the morning after I sleep a bit...