Finland’s Education Ministry announced on July 8 that it has formed a working group to come up a measure for evaluating the success with which university graduates throughout the country are able to secure a job that matches their education.
Minister of Education and Culture Sanni Grahn-Laasonen says the group will have until the end of the year to decide which factors could be used to determine job placement suitability and availability, a feature she refers to as "quality employment". She hopes the group's results could be used to set in motion the ministry's latest proposal to use the measure of employment quality to distribute university funding in future.
Leaders of two major universities in Finland wasted no time in expressing their reservations about the plan.
“The working group needs to think long and hard about what kind of indicators the funding model would include,” says Jukka Mönkkönen, Rector of the University of Eastern Finland. “The job market is constantly evolving and what counts as an appropriate job for one kind of education now may change, making adaptation a challenge.”
Mönkkönen was part of the previous working group that drew up an earlier university funding model completed late last year. He says some members of that group have stayed on as part of the so-called quality employment working group, but he only heard of the group’s existence when he read about it in the paper yesterday.
Needs of the business world go first?
The Ministry's Friday announcement justified the idea by saying that future university funding models must correspond to the needs of the business world.
“If graduates are able to secure employment that matches their educational merits, it proves the university's education is of a high quality,” centre-right NCP minister Grahn-Laasonen said in the announcement. "We must make sure to develop our education systems to answer the future needs of society. So graduates can find work that matches their training.”
36 million euros at stake
Ministry of Education Director Hannu Sirén says the quality employment appraisal would be only one of many criteria for university funding, should it be adapted. He admits, however, that a lot of money is in question.
According to the current plan, the quality employment model would potentially determine only two percent of the total 1.8 billion euros in university funding in Finland, but even so, it is still a hefty 36 million euros.
“Although it is possible that the working group and the government may decide to increase the weighting of the quality education factor in the future,” he says.
Sirén admits that developing an accurate measuring system with appropriate indicators will be a daunting task. He emphasizes that the working group contains representatives of the universities and its various interest groups. The ministry director says he believes that if it becomes a reality, the new funding model will also affect what kinds of education the universities will provide in the future.
“This would actually be a desirable outcome. There are several fields of study that are churning out too many unemployed.”
How to measure, that's the question
Rector of Helsinki’s University of the Arts Jari Perkiömäki says that if employment in one’s field of specialty is to be used as a measure of university efficiency, his University of the Arts should do comparatively well. He wonders how students of the humanities would fare, however.
“I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing that employment prospects would be measured, but I think it would be really hard to come up with criteria and a measuring technique that would genuinely tell something essential about the education in question,” he says.
He says it is clear that the current government wants to push Finland’s universities in a more commerce-oriented direction, where graduates would serve the needs of the business community.
“Everything they have done has made this apparent. But universities don’t exist for this purpose alone.”
