This article focuses on the history of Finnish academic women and examines the discussions about women's academic education and women scholars that took place in two Finnish magazines of the women's movement between 1890 and 1939. The article examines how the two magazines addressed the topics and represented academic women and women scholars. The…

In the past few centuries, an accelerating process of legalization and classification have moulded the diverse range of earlier institutions into a limited number of isomorphic organizational forms. Today, institutions of higher education, with their roots in the corporate forms of medieval universities, can also have the legal status of, for…

International degree programmes (IDPs) act as focal instruments for the internationalization of higher education in many non-English--speaking countries serving a variety of national objectives, with the commercial objective becoming increasingly common. This study analyses how IDPs have developed in one Nordic country, Finland, from a marginal…

The article starts with the serious question of why educational reforms do not lead to better learning. Although access to education has increased remarkably, the quality of education can be very low. The reality is that by 2030 there will be 800 million young people who do not have basic skills in reading and math. The answers will be sought from…

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the…

Universities have become major actors on the global stage. Yet, as they strive to be "world-class," institutions of higher education are shifting away from their core missions of cultivating democratic citizenship, fostering critical thinking, and safeguarding academic freedom. In the contest to raise their national and global profiles,…

This paper investigates the emergence of an engineering education research (EER) community in three Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden. First, an overview of the current state of Nordic EER authorship is produced through statistics on international publication. Then, the history of EER and its precursor activities is described in three…

Since the first publication of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results in 2000, the Finnish education system has received much praise both in Finland and abroad. In recent years, Finland started to build up its own education export sector with the aim of…

In just a couple of decades, Finland evolved from one of Europe's lowest educated countries to the top performer of the international PISA ranking. Behind this "success story", there was a conscious strategy to use educational policies for creating a more equal society. Tracing the development of Finnish higher education system after…

Within most educational systems, men and women tend to specialize in different fields of study. Comparing Austria and Finland, this article traces the extent and patterns of gender segregation within different educational levels between 1981 and 2005. Relying on official enrollment figures, a logarithmic index is used to measure overall and…

This paper concentrates on the expansion of Finnish higher education between the 1960s and 1970s, exposes its background in the light of the policy decisions that were made, compares the unique features of this expansion with those of certain other countries, discusses the impact of the controlled "top down" governance of higher…

In this article, the history of open university education in Finland and its position in the field of higher education is investigated. Open university education started in Finland as a small-scale regional activity in the beginning of the 1970s. When the Ministry of Education at the turn of 1980s took charge of open university education it was…

Discusses the history of engineering education and engineering as a profession in Finland. Assesses the role of formally trained engineers in past and present Finnish industry. (Author/CCM)

This article analyses and discusses the interplay between the social processes of nationalisation, localisation and globalisation in a single European nation state. The view of nationalisation put forward draws on a national case study based on historical and sociological research findings. The second part of the article presents a case study of…

Analyzes didactics as the hard core of Finnish pedagogic discourse and relates changes in the state educational discourse in Finland to recent developments in department-level curricula in teacher education at Finnish universities in the 1980s and 1990s. The tendency in Finland has been toward a decontextualized and nonhistorical science of…