In the winter of 1808, the Cossacks and hussars of the czar's Imperial Army poured across Russia's western border into the vast pine forests of Finland. By March they had come to the southern maritime city of Turku, which they quickly brought to heel. The local university, the Academy of Turku, was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the emperor, Alexander I, and was eventually recast in his name.
Alexander had nothing against the Finns per se, but they were then part of the larger Swedish kingdom whose leader, Gustav IV Adolf, had chosen the wrong side in the Napoleonic Wars. So things have always gone in Finland: Most of the important events that have happened have occurred as second-, third-, or nth-degree after-effects of a bigger, more important event that happened somewhere else.
I learned that on a lightless afternoon in early December while wandering through the National Museum of Finland, a large stone structure built on Mannerheim Boulevard in central Helsinki, where a handful of colleagues and I were staying as guests of the Finnish government. Christianity spread across Europe in the Middle Ages, and so the Finns became Catholics (and Swedes). Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door, and so the Finns became Lutherans, as most are today. Napoleon and Alexander carved up Europe between them, and so Finland became a grand duchy in the Russian Empire. Revolution came to Russia in 1917, and so Finland gained independence. World War II erupted, and so tens of thousands of Finns died defending the homeland. The cold war stuck the survivors between superpowers, and so they became experts in international diplomacy. The cold war ended, and so they were free.
As an American, it all sounds very objectionable. As large as Finland is small, as rich in natural resources as Finland is not, bordered by smaller, peaceable nations to the north and south and large oceans to the east and west, nobody has ever come to America and forced us to rename and reorganize our colleges and universities — or, for that matter, to do anything else. We're masters of our destiny, world leaders in higher education, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
Yet the history and present state of Finnish higher education suggest that such independence is more of a mixed blessing than we understand. Small, remote nations can't go it alone. Even as proximate military threats have receded, Finland remains highly dependent on its connections to Europe and the wider world. Finns acutely understand the importance of human capital and the dangers of falling behind their competitors. As a result, they've been far more willing to alter higher education to reflect their evolving society and meet the needs of the times.
Starting in the early 1990s, for example, Finland consolidated scores of smaller regional institutions into a brand-new system of polytechnics while simultaneously expanding the number of spaces available for students in those institutions and boosting the number of students with degrees in engineering, business, and other disciplines. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 29 percent of Finns age 25 to 34 have the equivalent of a bachelor's degree, compared with only 13 percent of those between the ages of 55 and 64. Like a growing number of countries, Finland's investment in higher education is bearing fruit, putting it in a better position to compete with historical leaders like the United States.
Proving that some aspects of higher education are universal and cross all borders of language and geography, the Finnish polytechnics are restless and aspire to the status of the longer-established, more prestigious research universities. Recently they unilaterally renamed themselves "universities of applied sciences." I asked two government officials about this: Anita Lehikoinen, director of the higher-education-and-science division at the Ministry of Education, and Raija Vahasalo, chair of the Parliament's education-and-culture committee. Both responded with the same tight, slightly amused smile and noted that the official term is still "polytechnic."
The Finns are also engaged in the growing international movement to create world-class universities. The United States has a hugely disproportionate share of the institutions so designated, and Americans seem to assume that will never change. Understanding that it's not easy to inflate the status of a single institution, the Finns are trying the more novel approach of combining three. The Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology, and University of Art and Design Helsinki are in the process of becoming Aalto University, a cross-disciplinary institution named for the famous Finnish master of design.
But in the long run, the most significant change in Finnish higher education may result from yet another larger European event: the Bologna Process, a vast, decade-long effort to harmonize European higher education that is spreading from the Continent to the rest of the world. In addition to standardizing degree cycles and easing the transfer of credit, Bologna has prompted universities across Europe to re-examine the way students are taught and what they're meant to learn. "It's a totally different way of thinking," Lehikoinen told us. "Our universities were built on the traditional Continental model of the research institution. Bologna puts students at the center of our attention, changing the focus from teaching to student-learning outcomes." Credit hours offer a telling example. While American credits are based on the number of hours students have contact with faculty members, credits in the Bologna Process are based on the number of hours students are expected to work to meet defined learning goals.
At the moment, legislators in Finland are working to fine-tune their system, consolidating some lower-enrollment institutions in rural areas, providing government support based on certain performance measures, and giving colleges and universities more autonomy to operate and raise private money on their own. They won't stray too far from the egalitarian tenets of the Nordic welfare state, however — tuition will remain free for all Finnish and European Union students. As one university official put it, "In Finland, privatization means all the funding still comes from the government."
Upon returning home, it's hard to look at American higher education and not see a kind of stagnation. Since the community-college systems were completed, in the 1970s, hardly anything in the core public and private nonprofit sectors has changed. We still have all the same institutions, organized (and unorganized) in almost exactly the same way. Attainment rates are flat for the most part, and many students who enter college still fail to graduate — the only difference is that they now pay a lot more money to do so. The tidal forces of the Bologna Process are still only ripples, or at least appear to be, by the time they reach our shores.
But few people in our country seem worried because everyone knows (and if they forget, are often reminded) that America has the greatest higher-education system in the world. Unlike those with different histories, we take preeminence for granted. We also have a remarkably high tolerance for failure, with barely half of all students graduating within six years. "In a huge country like the United States or Germany," Vahasalo noted, "maybe you don't need to take care of everybody to have the educated people you need. We are small, so everyone counts."
When the American economy held a bounty of blue-collar jobs, low college-attainment rates were more manageable. But increasingly, everyone counts here, too.
And there's no guarantee that our global dominance of higher education will last forever. One of the fascinating things about the Bologna Process is the way that it has spread to countries in the European orbit — and potentially beyond. The examination of student-learning goals inherent in the process is far more serious than anything most state and federal policy makers would even contemplate asking of American institutions — in part because many American policy makers don't even know the Bologna Process exists.
And what about the poor, subjected Academy of Turku? In the long run, being vanquished by Cossacks turned out to be a pretty good deal. Alexander I had progressive ideas about education and increased the number of faculty positions in Turku by 50 percent. He also boosted the university's financial support and gave it an exclusive franchise to publish and sell almanacs nationwide. When a great fire nearly wiped out the university's library, in 1827, Nicholas I moved the institution to the recently established capital of Helsinki. Thirty thousand volumes were donated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, along with the right to a free copy of every book published within the Russian Empire.
Many of those volumes are still there today, on Senate Square across from the austere Lutheran Cathedral, lining the shelves of the ornate and beautiful library of Imperial Alexander University — or, as it's better known, the University of Helsinki, a thriving institution that attracts scholars and students from across Finland, Europe, and beyond. A university of the world, in a way that too many American institutions are not.
Kevin Carey is research and policy manager at Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington.
http://chronicle.com Section: Commentary Volume 55, Issue 20, Page A33
