External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted.…

Fluent transitions to higher education are a common concern, especially in highly selective Finnish teacher education (TE). This study examined the fit between the matriculation examination (ME) results and the selection criteria applied in TE. We studied the accepted applicants in Finland in 2013-2015 (n = 5116), and both the accepted and…

I use a panel of higher education clearinghouse data to study the centralized assignment of applicants to Finnish polytechnics. Many top applicants remain completely unassigned each year. The same applicants' future applications reveal that many of them should have been admitted to a different program immediately. The application system, however,…

England has a 'pre-qualification' system of higher education admissions, where applications and offers are made to young people before exam results are received. While in most cases offers are conditional on achieving a grade target in A Level exams, recent years have seen an exponential growth in 'unconditional offers', where the offer of a place…

The core theme of this article is the emerging tension between the egalitarian discourse that increases the general aspiration of people to become more educated and actual admission constraints. A desire to attend a university and not being allowed to (i.e. non-admittance) is a loss that can potentially result in an anomic condition. Anomie theory…

First-time entrants to tertiary education are required to make interconnected decisions about their field of study, the fees they will pay and the application requirements they are prepared to face. Their choice of programme and institution will be influenced by the costs and entry criteria. The decisions they make about what to study and where…

Purpose: This study focuses on courses that prepare applicants for universities' highly competitive entrance examinations in Finland. The analysis clarifies the market-making practices and the construction of this field. Design/Approach/Methods: To understand these processes, we use Caliskan and Callon's five framings for studying marketization as…

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of service values on the processing of word-of-mouth (WOM) information, and their impact on a complex belief in a high-involvement service context. Hypotheses are tested on survey data collected from 378 respondents facing a high-involvement service choice. The results suggest that two distinct…

This study investigates the quality of the critical thinking skills of applicants (n = 77) seeking entry to the faculty of educational sciences in a Finnish university and how these skills are associated with the applicant's age, previous higher education experience, and matriculation and entrance examination scores. The data consist of the…