The university is accessible – but access without support is not opportunity.
That’s Juan Camilo, the University of Iceland’s intercultural officer, describing the operating principle of a mentoring programme where students earn a full ten-credit module for doing inclusion work with refugee and immigrant communities. Credit literally where it’s due.
It’s the afternoon of Day One of the Wonkhe SUs study tour to Iceland, where we’ve crossed the University of Iceland campus from the Student Council offices to Setberg – a building dedicated entirely to teaching support.
The Division of Academic Affairs runs out of Setberg and it’s bigger than it sounds. Under one roof is the Centre for Teaching and Learning, which handles course design, assessment, the Canvas LMS, and lecture recording.
There’s a Student Counselling Centre offering academic advising, disability services, career guidance, and free short-term psychological services from clinical psychologists – with exchange students eligible for disability and counselling support on the same basis as registered students, which is significant with Erasmus coming back.
There’s also the Graduate School, and Sprettur.
Credit where it’s due
Sprettur is the thing we’ve been talking about most. It’s an educational inclusion programme supporting people with immigrant or refugee backgrounds who come from families with little or no experience of university education. It runs mentored study groups, language support, workshops, and intercultural events – all free.
The programme’s director holds the formal title of Intercultural Officer for the university and works alongside equality structures across the institution. In a country where nine per cent of students above compulsory education level are now foreign citizens – the highest proportion to date – and where 44 per cent of doctoral students are foreign citizens, this isn’t a niche concern.
What makes it more than a support service is the credited mentoring course. University students can enrol in a five-ECTS course – equivalent to a ten-credit UK module, so this isn’t a token gesture – to serve as Sprettur mentors, committing to regular meetings and seminars in exchange for academic credit that counts toward their degree.
The inclusion work is not bolted on as volunteering, not dependent on goodwill, not funded year-to-year through a grant that might not be renewed – it’s a module, and it appears on a transcript. As Juan puts it, “that’s the beauty of it – the students go from, oh, I’m helping someone, to I also deserve a credit, because I’m being evaluated. It’s really fair for both ways.”
And the students being mentored get consistent, trained support from people who are themselves being assessed on the quality of that support.
The mentors run structured study groups, work through academic language, and help people navigate a university system that assumes a level of cultural knowledge that first-generation immigrant students may not have. But the boundaries are deliberate. “We don’t want the students to become social workers,” Juan says:
They are academic mentors. If you have a problem with a landlord, I’m not your person. If you have a mental health issue, I’m not your person. But I can support you in your study.
The seminars that accompany the course mean the mentors are themselves being supported and trained as they go – it’s not a case of pairing a well-meaning second-year with a bewildered newcomer and hoping for the best. There’s a curriculum for the mentors too.
But Sprettur has a bigger thesis than peer support. Juan describes his work as “cultivating ecologies of belonging” – and frames it as a question about what kind of society Iceland is building.
The big question is which kind of Iceland we want to see in 10 years. Do we want to see a stratification where people of foreign background are only in the lowest-paid jobs – or are we creating a structure so that those who want to can receive all the opportunities they deserve?
The role of the university, in this framing, is not only to prepare students for the labour market:
…it’s about cultivating active citizenship, social responsibility, and how we are building up a society together.
Sprettur is also involved in a cross-institutional effort to develop a formal inclusion policy for all publicly funded universities in Iceland – and it offers schools a model for setting up their own intercultural mentoring schemes, extending its reach beyond higher education entirely.
Could a UK students’ union work with its institution to accredit peer mentoring for students from underrepresented backgrounds? The ECTS credit mechanism makes it structurally easy in a way that the UK’s systems doesn’t always allow, but the principle – pay students in credit for doing inclusion work – is transferable.
The standardised template
Also in Setberg – and also worth the visit – is the Centre for Teaching and Learning’s work on AI. In December 2025, the University Council passed a formal AI policy – not guidance, not a set of suggestions from a working group, but a policy with governance weight, structured around three pillars: skills and knowledge, efficiency and innovation, and equality and accessibility.
The student-facing position is disarmingly clean – AI is treated like any other source or aid. You cite it by the university’s standard citation procedures. If you break the rules your instructor sets for AI use in a particular course, it’s academic misconduct under Article 19 of the national higher education act.
The bit that made us listen is the equality pillar. The university has committed to ensuring that essential AI software and infrastructure are equally accessible to all students – not just those who can afford a ChatGPT subscription – and to developing a standardised template so that every course handles AI the same way.
In practice, there’s a gap between the aspiration and the reality. Students currently have access to Copilot, but only a handful of licences – the Icelandic government is negotiating a broader Microsoft 365 contract for universities, and in the meantime students are largely using their own personal accounts. The centre acknowledges the inequality. But the point is that the policy names it as a problem to be solved institutionally, not something to be left to individual students’ ability to pay.
No more of the UK situation where one lecturer bans it entirely, the next one requires it, a third hasn’t heard of it, and the student in the middle has no idea what the rules are. It’s clear, fair, standardised, written down.
They’re also building awareness of bias in AI modelling into all training and implementation plans. The whole thing was developed by the Centre for Teaching and Learning and adopted at institutional level in a matter of months. It’s a living document – they expect to revise it regularly as the technology moves.
But the baseline is set, and it’s the same baseline for every student in every course. That shouldn’t feel remarkable, but it does.
3,000 golden eggs
From Setberg we walk to Gróska – an innovation hub on the edge of campus that houses startups, research bodies, the university’s technology transfer office, and KLAK – Icelandic Startups.
KLAK is a non-profit that runs business accelerators, competitions, and workshops, and connects founders with mentors and investors. It was founded in 2000, merged in 2013 with Innovit – an accelerator founded by engineering students – and is now jointly owned by the University of Iceland, Reykjavik University, a major tech firm, a government-backed venture fund, and the Federation of Icelandic Industries.
That ownership structure alone is interesting – a startup accelerator co-owned by two competing universities, industry, and government, sitting on a university campus, operating as a non-profit.
The flagship is Gulleggið – “the golden egg” – Iceland’s largest entrepreneurship competition, running annually since 2008. Over 3,000 ideas have been submitted across its history. It’s designed for teams at the earliest stage – you don’t need a business plan, you need an idea, and it feeds directly into KLAK’s accelerator programmes.
Hringiða is a six-week green solutions accelerator. KLAK Health is a five-week health technology programme that runs “ideation sprints” – short hackathons with challenges set by the national hospital and the ministry of health. Dafna is an incubator for recipients of government technology grants.
Snjallræði – “smart moves” – is a series of workshops for people who aren’t ready for a full accelerator yet. And 180 volunteer mentors from the business community are matched to startups using the MIT Venture Mentoring Service model, working in small advisory panels rather than one-to-one pairings.
The rapid-fire catalogue is deliberate – KLAK runs three to four accelerator programmes a year, each with a different sector focus, alongside the competition and the incubator. It’s a lot of activity for a country of 395,000 people.
KLAK was included in the Financial Times ranking of Europe’s leading startup hubs for the first time in 2025 and climbed thirteen places in 2026. Only 180 hubs across Europe make the list.
Five courses, same size, every time
Between meetings we spend some time looking at how degrees actually work here, and the structural simplicity is interesting. The Business Administration BS is a three-year, 180 ECTS (320 UK Credits, like a UG) programme – every module is 6 ECTS, five modules per semester, no exceptions.
There’s no 15-credit dissertation module sitting awkwardly alongside a 5-credit elective, no variable credit weighting, and no timetabling nightmares. Every piece is the same size and they all fit together like tiles. The first two years are entirely prescribed – 18 compulsory courses, identical across all five specialisation tracks – and year three opens up into an elective pool with a 6 or 12 ECTS thesis at the end.
Students pick their track at entry but the structural consequence of that choice is deferred until the final year. It’s specialisation as a slow reveal rather than an early commitment.
Interestingly, skills teaching is included – there’s a first-year professional practice workshop covering study skills, ethics, source handling, and group work, plus an IT course where students bring their own laptops for Excel.
The business plans course in year two is the most delivery-intensive unit in the whole degree – students produce a complete business plan with financial projections and then present and defend it in a simulated investor pitch. Electives all involve recorded lectures, and student facilitated seminars – cheap to deliver, but plenty of choice.
Grading runs 0–10, pass at five, and you need an overall average of six to graduate. There’s no degree classification – no firsts, no 2:1s. Just a number. The optional work placement is the only element assessed pass–fail. Everything else gets a number on the scale.
The simplicity of it all – uniform module size, embedded skills, no classification system – produces a degree that is cheap to deliver and easy to understand.
The main players in the entrepreneurship sector
For students specifically, the entry point to the innovation world is Sprotamýri – the university’s own entrepreneurship centre within Gróska, which offers 12 open workspace desks allocated three times a year to students and staff developing business ideas. Twelve desks.
It’s like WeWork, but it’s free, it comes with access to KLAK’s mentors and programmes, and it exists as a formal part of the university’s infrastructure rather than as a side project run by an enthusiastic academic.
The student association at Reykjavik University – which we’ll visit next – manages its own innovation centre on a similar model and co-hosts the Gulleggið vísindaferð, the competition’s biggest single company visit of the year.
In early 2026, KLAK joined forces with Business Iceland, the Science Parks, and the Technology Development Fund for a national innovation roadshow – touring communities around the country to make sure entrepreneurs outside Reykjavík know the support system exists.
In a country this small, that means driving through lava fields to a town of 800 people – and the person you’re meeting might well be a former Gulleggið finalist who’s now employing six of them.
We leave Gróska and head to Nauthólsvík – a geothermal beach where we’ll be recording this week’s The Wonkhe Show in a hot tub. Just as well it’s audio really.
