Finland’s higher education vision is a pledge without a budget

Slotting straight into that slipstream, Finland has a new vision for higher education and research.

It runs to 2040, it’s called Bildung as a way forward for Finland, and it sets out to raise the proportion of young adults holding a degree from 39 per cent to 60 per cent.

The foreword is fun. The National Coalition Party’s Mari-Leena Talvitie, Minister of Science and Culture, argues that Finland’s story is a “story of sivistys” – that Finland’s success across generations at building trust, democracy, and international standing rested on education and research-based knowledge. It’s positioned as something Finland has that other countries are now losing, with a pointed reference to international democratic backsliding and the erosion of academic freedom globally.

Later, sivistys is given almost constitutional status – “critical thinking and openness are the foundation of security and stability,” and “science, art and culture strengthen the capacity for thought and innovation.” Here, universities aren’t just skills factories – they’re the institutional foundation of a functioning democracy. The Ministry will even investigate legislative changes to protect academic freedom across all higher education activity, and higher education communities are asked to actively support staff and students participating in civic debate.

The whole thing has cross-party support, a 15-month consultation behind it, and the full backing of the rectors’ council, both national student unions, and a parliamentary monitoring group covering every party in the Finnish parliament.

Trouble is, Finland’s previous HE vision also had cross-party support, was also developed in extensive consultation with universities, student unions, and sector stakeholders, and also set a headline attainment target – 50 per cent of young adults holding a higher education degree by 2030. That target was published in 2017.

Finland is currently at 39 per cent, essentially flat for two decades and, according to the OECD, one of only six countries in the OECD and partner economies to have experienced a decline in this age group’s attainment in recent years.

SYL, the national university students’ union, had this response:

A reform of the vision for higher education is welcome: the previous vision set up a number of objectives worth supporting, but over the years, they have mainly remained as ideas on paper.

The steering group that finalised the vision described it as “a joint pledge for Finland by higher education and research.” The Ministry of Finance isn’t in the document, nor is the ministry responsible for social security, nor the ministry responsible for immigration policy. The document’s own fiscal honesty section notes that the debt brake Finland has adopted on a cross-party basis “will likely also affect the level of state funding for higher education and research” – but offers no mechanism, no envelope, and no commitment to resolve the tension.

This isn’t unusual for vision documents of this type. It matters because the gap between what this vision aspires to and what the government has been doing to students and universities over the last three years is significant.

They knew

The Orpo government came to power in June 2023 with a €6 billion austerity programme. Education, the Prime Minister had said during the election campaign, was “under special protection from cuts.” Students exhaled – then the general housing allowance was cut by €363 million – 43 per cent of recipients are student households, and on average student housing support fell by €76 per month.

The study grant was index-frozen for 2024–27, which with prices rising represented a real-terms cut of approximately 5.9 per cent immediately.

The government-guaranteed student loan ceiling was raised from €650 to €850 a month – a move presented as support for students, but more accurately described as increasing their debt exposure as a substitute for support. By 2024, more than 70 per cent of graduating students had loan debt, averaging around €20,000 per graduate.

The Student Union of Tampere University said “the vision lacks consideration for the students’ livelihood.” They called for parliamentary work to create a dedicated higher education funding act – not because they thought the vision was worthless, but because they’d watched the previous one die by a thousand budget decisions over the best part of a decade, and they wanted something that couldn’t just be eroded away between election cycles.

Meanwhile, as the vision was being drafted, the government’s mid-term spending framework cut basic university funding by €30 million in 2026, €20 million in 2027, and €15 million annually from 2028 – a total reduction of €117.7 million across three years.

The August 2025 draft budget, before it was partially walked back, was even more aggressive, with proposals including an index freeze that would have meant reductions of €59 million in 2026 and €112 million in 2027 on top of the announced cuts. The University of Vaasa’s rector summarised what that had already done to Finland’s competitive position:

Earlier freezes and cuts have already pushed Finnish university funding permanently below the level of other Nordic countries. When adjusted for student numbers, Finland’s universities operate with 20–30 per cent less funding than their Swedish, Norwegian and Danish counterparts.

The government offered some new research funding in partial offset – €20 million in 2026, rising to €39 million per year from 2027 for universities – but, as the academics’ union Tieteentekijät pointed out, it’s targeted competitive and project-based money going into the parts of the system the funding model rewards, not core funding that gives institutions the stability to plan long-term, hire well, or expand teaching capacity.

Tieteentekijät also noted that the underlying funding model is “among the world’s most performance-oriented,” with higher education institutions “operating under conflicting steering signals – the Ministry calls for cooperation and specialisation, while financial steering stresses competition.” The OECD has expressed concern about the model after interviewing Finnish stakeholders. None of that made it into the vision document.

The second degrees problem

A significant number of students in Finland are pursuing second, third, or even fourth degrees in a system with no tuition fees for domestic students – which means some current capacity is being occupied by people who already have a degree while first-generation students can’t get in.

The vision gestures at this with a proposal to redirect degree places toward “education-level-raising” qualifications, but doesn’t identify the mechanism and doesn’t confront the political implications of introducing differential access to a system that has always been free.

If the 60 per cent target requires telling some Finnish citizens they can’t come back for a second degree while the first-degree backlog clears, that’s a significant political choice – and not one a vision document is designed to make.

Universities Finland (Unifi) has wasted no time in turning the vision into election positioning. Their joint message for the 2027–31 parliamentary term is already published, built around the 60 per cent target and a call to extend the R&D Funding Act to 2040.

The Student Union of the University of Helsinki published its own 2027 election programme in May, calling for a long-term parliamentary plan to reach 60 per cent, basic funding raised to the Nordic level, and a shift in the funding model away from its current degree-output orientation toward something more credit-based that reduces competition between institutions.

In other words everyone in Finnish HE agree loudly on a target, agree that it requires more money, and then aim their arguments at a parliament that doesn’t yet exist. The Orpo government has been, in Holopainen’s word, “hesitant” to commit new funding ahead of the 2027 elections.

The implementation plan is due in autumn 2026, and that plan will either be detailed and funded – in which case it becomes a hostage to whichever coalition forms after the election – or it will be a framework of good intentions that the next government either picks up or doesn’t.

SYL had the clearest diagnosis of why this keeps happening:

The Orpo government is not prepared to increase Finland’s educational funding due to its focus on fiscal prudence, and would instead like to see the sector produce more for the same amount of money. Simply increasing efficiency and reallocating starting places will not be enough to raise the level of education.

The youth barometer finding in the vision document – that 81 per cent of young Finns want to pursue a higher education degree – is deployed as evidence that demand exists and that the 60 per cent target is deliverable. What the vision’s situation picture also notes, though the document moves past it quickly, is that young people’s confidence in the future is on a “worryingly declining trend.”

That’s not something you fix with smoother upper-secondary-to-university transition pathways and a national guidance framework. It’s the sound of a generation watching policy promises made and then defunded across consecutive parliamentary terms – housing support cut, study grants eroded, loan balances growing – and now being invited to believe that this time, the vision really will be different.

Maybe it will. The 4 per cent R&D target from the 2017 vision is apparently on track, which shows the model can work when there’s both legislative backing and sustained political will. But the attainment target from that same vision – the one the new document is designed to replace and exceed – is going backwards.

Finland will have an election in 2027. The implementation plan is due this autumn. We’ll find out then whether this vision is a pledge or a set of ideas on paper.