Finnish students are extremely slow to complete their degrees and should be financially penalised according to a Finnish higher education expert.

Writing in the online magazine University World News, Australian academic Ian Dobson, who ‘spends much of his time in Finland’, claims that Finns are amongst the oldest in the EU to actually start their studies in first place and when they do only 37 percent complete them in what the government regards as a reasonable period of time.

To complete their degree in five years (the minimum time it can take other than in exceptional circumstances), claims Dobson, students must amass 60 credits a year. The government target is for them to amass just 45.

The slowest students seem to study at Tampere University, Aalto University (in Helsinki) and Helsinki University. Tampere and Aalto concentrate on the hard sciences, such as engineering, while Helsinki has a very large arts and social science intake.

According to Dobson, the explanation for this slow completion is that student grants have not kept up with inflation and so many students subsidise their rents by working.

Dobson suggests that students should be incentivised to complete their degrees more quickly by introducing tuition fees after a set period of free higher education. He also argues that student grants should be index-linked to reflect the very high cost of living in Helsinki in particular.

Matti Parpala, the leader of the National Union of University Students in Finland, is critical of Dobson’s proposals.

According to Parpala, himself studying at Aalto University, the introduction of tuition fees would ‘lead to students dropping out without getting any degree at all.’ He cautiously favours index-linked grants but notes that his union has opposed them – in the form presented by the government – because they would involve a very low work-threshold before students were considered to be earning too much money.

‘We have a culture of being very experienced in work life before we graduate,’ he told 65DN. ‘I think a lot of employers would not hire a graduate if they had no work experience.’

‘Also our labour unions have said that it’s better for students to delay graduation than graduate and then be unemployed. A lot of employers look on you very negatively if you have three months unemployment on your CV.’