Why Finland?

What makes International Education work in Finland?

Finland is a country of 5.1 million people located in the North of Europe with Sweden, Norway and Russia as its neighbours. Since 1995, Finland has been a member of the European Union. Education has always been a high priority for Finland. At the moment, Finland has 21 university level institutions and 30 polytechnics. International students (including both degree and exchange students) constitute about five per cent of the total student enrolment at the above institutions.

Citizens of a relatively small country like Finland understand that contacts with other countries are a key to survival and success to today's global competition. Finns have always been eager to study abroad and to bring new skills back home from foreign countries. For professionals of international education in Finland, the problem is not how to persuade Finnish students to depart on an exchange in other countries. The key issue for us has always been how to attract international students to Finland and to achieve reciprocity in student exchanges with foreign universities.

During the 1990s, student mobility flows to and from Finland have increased dramatically. However, until recently, students studying abroad clearly outnumbered the international exchange students coming to study in Finland. For this reason, it was quite surprising for us to learn that, according to statistics published by the European Commission in Spring 2000, Finland (considering its size) seemed to have become the most popular destination for European ERASMUS exchange students planning to study in another European country during the academic year 2000-2001. Not only have the numbers of ERASMUS students been growing. A similar development has also been visible in the flows of students coming to Finland through other international exchange programs and bilateral exchange programs of Finnish universities and polytechnics. (For further information, please see the Statistical Overview of the Development of internationalisation in the Nordic countries distributed to the participants of this session).

Why Finland?

Why have the numbers of international exchange students increased so much during the last years of the 1990s? Why do more and more international exchange students today choose Finland as their destination? In the following, I will briefly try to describe some of the reasons for this development. My conclusions are based both 1) on my own observations during the last eleven years and 2) on a study entitled "Why Finland?" carried out by the Finnish Centre for International Mobility, CIMO, and in the fall of the year 2000. To find out what makes international students come and study in Finland, a questionnaire was sent to about 1,000 newly arrived international exchange students, of whom 561 students of 52 different nationalities answered the survey.