Non EU/EES students will, from the 1st January 2010, pay to study in Sweden. This is the latest comment from the Swedish government, as part of the the Internationalisation of Higher Education bill which will come into effect in the Autumn of this year, as reported in SvD this morning.
Update, December 12th 2008: The 1st of January date may not be correct, it could be later in the year. There is no officially published date as yet.
This story is now also available in english at The Local.
The article is a little light on detail but the following main facts emerge:
- kick off will be the 1st January 2010 (see the above update)
- fees will be set by each university
- there will be some form of scholarship system
The previous government, according to SvD, suggested 80 000 SEK per year as a fee. That’s about 8 500 EURO (to put that into perspective, an international student studying in the UK pays around 12 500 EURO).
So, that’s about one and half years to decide on a marketing strategy, set up the infrastructure and recruit students. This is a huge change for Swedish education and the implications for our university are massive. The critical question is ‘if we had fees, would you have still have come to Lund?’.
There’s plenty of discussion about this at the SvD site - close on a 100 comments in the last few hours.
Updated 2 July 2008 – For some of the background to the Governments announcement take a look at the summary, in English, of their investigation into tuition fees. You need to take a look at pages 13 – 16 for the english summary.
Students who have already begun studying, or are applying in the application periods starting in 2008 or 2009, will not pay fees. The vote will be in Spring 2009. More information will be available then.
