Jim’s working assumption is that wandering around Reykjavík yelling “Play Ja Ja Ding Dong” is probably not the done thing.
So to get it out of his system and to help prepare for this year’s Spring SUs study tour to Iceland, he re-watched Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (the 2020 romantic comedy set in fishing village Húsavík in the north) for the hundredth time.
A quick click on IMDB led him down the rabbit hole of Icelandic TV’s back catalogue to Ráðherrann (“The Minister”), a sort of West Wing meets Borgen set during an Icelandic general election.
The premise is that a theology professor called Benedikt becomes chairman of the Independence Party, forms an unlikely coalition with the Social Democrats, and announces live on television that he won’t form a government unless 90 per cent of registered voters turn out.
Everyone treats this as impossibly idealistic. But early in the first episode, Benedikt wanders into the party’s phonebank, where a young staffer called Hrefna is trying to persuade a sceptical voter from the north – the son of the harbourmaster in Benedikt’s own county – to turn out.
The man dismisses Benedikt as a dreamer who stopped coming up north a long time ago. Benedikt takes the phone. “Good evening. It’s Benedikt. Benni.” The man immediately caves. Benedikt tells him to say hi to his dad, hangs up, and delivers the hilarious line: “the harbourmaster harbours no doubt.”
That scene works because the country is so small that a party leader can personally know a random phonebank contact. Iceland has a population of 395,000 people – roughly the population of Coventry (although without the student housing surplus).
And that 90 per cent turnout target that everyone in the show treats as fantasy? Iceland consistently gets 98 per cent of TV viewers tuning into the Eurovision Grand Final. In 2023 it hit 98.7 per cent. In 2025, 97.8 per cent. The national selection, Söngvakeppnin, pulled 145,090 viewers for its first semi-final in 2025 – 43.6 per cent of the entire population. Not that they’re in it this year – there’s an Israel-related boycott on.
In-flight entertainment
Somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, with a couple of hours of reading and a can of something Icelandic to hand, we’re doing what we always do on the way out – trying to make sense of the system before we’re standing in it.
We’re on our way to the Wonkhe SUs study tour to Iceland, and it’s all a bit baffling. Everything is so small and so interconnected that each organisation seems to blur into the next.
The student council appoints members to the board of the student services foundation, which was established by an act of parliament in 1968, which runs the student bar, which hosts the music festival, which launches the bands. Pull one thread and the whole thing comes with it.
The country has seven accredited universities – four public, three private – governed by a single national act with no regional or devolved layer. The University of Iceland, founded in 1911, enrols the majority of the country’s roughly 18,000 higher education students. Reykjavik University is the largest private institution at around 3,300.
Some of the others are tiny. Bifröst University – founded in 1918 as a cooperative college modelled on Ruskin College, Oxford – went fully online in 2024. The Agricultural University of Iceland sits in a nature reserve an hour from Reykjavík and has a ram appreciation society called Hreðjar. The entire system would fit inside a mid-sized English redbrick and still leave room for the car park.
Free as in nearly
Public universities don’t charge tuition fees – just an annual registration fee, currently around £600. Private institutions charge real tuition – up to ISK 1,800,000 (£10,900) a year depending on field and level.
But all seven institutions, public and private, receive individual appropriations from the state budget, allocated per student by field of study. Even the private universities are majority publicly funded for teaching. The line between “public” and “private” is blurrier than it looks from a distance. Student finance runs through the Menntasjóður námsmanna – the Student Education Fund – a loan system with a partial write-off on completion, which we’ll hear a lot more about later in the trip.
The most striking number in our pre-tour notes is the age. Icelandic students have a mean age of 29.7 years – the oldest student population in Europe. The mean entry age is 23.9, even though most students finish upper secondary education at 20. Forty-three per cent of students are aged 30 or over. Around a third are parents. Iceland also has the highest proportion of student parents in any EUROSTUDENT country.
Taking time out between school and university to work, travel, or just figure things out is normalised rather than pathologised.
We’re curious about what a students’ union looks like when it’s built for a membership whose average member is nearly 30 and quite possibly has a toddler. And we’re assuming that talking to SU officers will be like watching an episode of One Tree Hill (ask your Membership Services Manager…)
The bell and the sack race
Before leaving we spent some time getting to know SHA – the student union at the University of Akureyri, a public university in northern Iceland founded in 1987 with around 2,800 students.
Akureyri operates a really interesting “flexible study” model in which much teaching is delivered online, with students travelling to campus for periodic intensive sessions called lotur.
SHA surveyed students and found that 68 per cent wanted attendance at these sessions to be compulsory at least once per semester – particularly in business studies, where optional attendance was leaving people feeling isolated and disconnected. Belonging presumably matters in a country where the sun’s only up for 4 hours a day in the winter.
The traditions are fun. At the start of each academic year, a first-year student rings a large bell on the campus – an artwork gifted by the municipality – once for each year since the millennium.
Sprellmót is an annual inter-faculty games day in which seven faculty associations turn up in costume for sack races, balloon relays, pyramid-building, and a talent show, with scores awarded not just for winning but for costumes, bribery of judges, and general atmosphere.
Meanwhile the student rights officer is a proper Martin Lewis role – publishing template emails and step-by-step instructions so that students with a disability rating of 75 per cent or above can claim a 50 per cent refund of the registration fee.
Summer placements since 1992
Rannís – the Icelandic Centre for Research – is the national funding agency for research, innovation, education, and culture, and also serves as Iceland’s national agency for Erasmus+, Horizon Europe, and Creative Europe.
For students, the exciting thing is the Student Innovation Fund, which enables universities, research institutes, and companies to hire undergraduates and master’s students for paid summer placements in research and development. It’s been running since 1992 – jointly financed by central government and Reykjavík city – placements tend to lead directly to job offers.
The doctoral grant stream of the Icelandic Research Fund doesn’t require prior experience running research projects, just enrolment in a research-based programme. In 2025, 64 projects were funded from 381 applications, totalling around ISK 1.1 billion (roughly £6 million).
There’s also a strategic programme for language technology aimed at protecting Icelandic in the digital age – speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing – reflecting an entirely reasonable anxiety that a language spoken by fewer than 400,000 people will be quietly sidelined as technology defaults to English. A problem the Welsh language lobby would recognise.
The ones who leave
SÍNE – Samband íslenskra námsmanna erlendis – is the national representative body for Icelandic students studying outside Iceland. Founded in 1961, it exists because outward student mobility isn’t a recent phenomenon here – it’s structural. The whole country is a “cold spot” for some subjects, and a significant proportion of students have always studied part of their degree abroad.
It runs Farabara.is, a study-abroad portal with country guides, scholarship information, and first-hand accounts. It publishes Sæmundur, a magazine covering everything from reverse culture shock to the experience of partners who relocate for someone else’s degree.
It does advocacy too – it’s submitted formal consultation responses to parliament on student loan reform. It has even produced a practical guide to making Iceland’s national electronic ID system work on a phone from abroad – which apparently doesn’t, because the SMS authentication fails outside the country. It’s niche, but the kind of niche that makes you feel seen.
Ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections, SÍNE interviewed candidates from across the political spectrum on their parties’ positions on student loan policy and published the results as a voter information tool, alongside a step-by-step guide to casting an absentee ballot from an embassy.
And it runs a repatriation guide – Á heimleið, “on the way home” – covering everything from transferring official residence registration to the psychological difficulty of readjusting to a country you thought you knew.
The whole operation has a representative on the board of the national student loan fund, was a founding member of LÍS, the national union, and sits at the table when legislation is drafted.
All of this for a constituency that is, by definition, somewhere else. Could a UK students’ union – or NUS – find a way to represent the students who leave? The ones on placements abroad, the ones who transfer, the ones who interrupt and don’t come back?
Probably not a priority when everyone’s struggling to represent the ones who are (still) physically there. But SÍNE’s existence suggests that leaving doesn’t have to mean disappearing.
Anyway, the seatbelt light’s on. Time to land. More tomorrow.
