The Finnish Education System According To Me

Time for me to make an attempt at explaining the Finnish education system, while also trying to keep it brief and readable. I predict both of these aspects are going to suffer. I’m sorry, it’s going to be a snooze fest.

The Finnish education system is valued around the world, it has been stated to be the best one by a variety of researchers, and exams like PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) have supported this. It is indeed something of a pride to Finland, and I agree it is an excellent system, to a certain point. At university level, I, personally, start seeing cracks in it, but never mind that, we have other matters to discuss here.

Education is free from the get go. Only in upper secondary (term explained later) do you have to start paying for books, the rest still remains free. At university level you only have to pay a small, mandatory fee to belong to the Student Union, which looks after students' rights - note, this is not a tuition fee of any sorts ***. The fact that education is kept free, and that all educational institutions are looked over by a single government organ, pretty much guarantees that students have as equal as possible a chance at getting educated. This government organ, among other things, regulates what each student should have learned by certain point and looks over the quality of teaching provided.

Now, before I continue: You should note that the Finnish educational system and its levels are not really compatible with the American one, so, though I might state so and so is the equivalent of so and so of American variety, you should not take it literally and project your education system directly onto ours. I’m making the comparisons simply to make it slightly more relatable.

At the age of 7 (or 6, if you were born towards the end of the year like I was) Finnish children enter what we call ala-aste, which literally translates to ‘lower level‘. It is our equivalent of the elementary school. This stage lasts for 6 years, covering grades from 1-6. When we are the age of 13 (or 12, again if you were born later in the year) we move on to ylä-aste, which directly translates to ‘upper level’. It is our equivalent of middle school or junior high. The dictionary translates it to upper comprehensive school, which is the term I prefer to use if I have to translate the word. This stage lasts for three years, covering grades 7-9. During the last year of upper comprehensive school, it is time to start making some important decisions.

After graduating from upper comprehensive school, at the age of 15-16, you are done with compulsory education. You can choose to enter lukio (upper secondary) or ammattikoulu (vocational school). There are also some specialized institutions that are pretty much different types of vocational schools, they are more specific on the fields they offer. There is, for example, kauppaoppilaitos (a trading and business school) and maatalousoppilaitos (an agricultural school). You can also try getting a job directly after upper comprehensive school, which is extremely difficult without career specific education, or gaining some sort of an apprenticeship contract that enables you to earn a mainly vocational-school-provided degree by working and occasionally attending exams. The main options, however, are upper secondary and vocational school.

Vocational school is traditionally seen as a more relaxed option of the two and it is easier to get in to (lower grade average requirement). It directly starts to prepare you for a job in the field you choose to study and has very little general studies - it usually only takes three years to gain a basic degree. From these schools you can graduate to become things like an electrician, a car mechanic, a travel agent, a chef, a practical nurse, a media assistant, an artisan, a carpenter, a hair dresser, a cosmetologist, a datanome, or you can get a Vocational Qualification business and administration degree…etc. You get the picture. After earning your degree you can choose to start working or continue to ammattikorkeakoulu (polytechnic/ university of applied sciences).

Upper secondary (our equivalent of high school…and more) is traditionally seen as the more prestigious option of the two, and is known to be difficult to get through. This is the route to take if you want to enter university and have dreams of becoming a lawyer, a doctor, and so on. This is also the route I went with. Upper secondary does not prepare you for a specific field, instead it is pretty much deeper level general studies, and it lasts for three years. It has earned its reputation as difficult to get through because of a large amount of coursework and exams. Every school month ends in a week filled with nothing but exams. Sometimes students might end up having to go through seven exams in seven days, if they happen to have a lot of courses that month. Each exam requires plenty of reading as the study area usually covers the whole course book. Top this off with the actual regular school work, and some smaller exams, and it might start to look like a slightly intimidating picture, at least for those who didn’t attend it. (Those who did attend and stick with it, and paid at least some attention during classes, would likely tell you that it isn’t as bad as it may seem. You get used to it.)

The culmination of all this testing and work is ylioppilaskirjoitukset, the Matriculation Examination, the mother of all exams, and perhaps the main reason for people considering upper secondary to be difficult. It is a strictly supervised series of exams, created, held and graded on a national level. There‘s one round of exams in the spring time and one during fall, dividing your exam sprint to two. You are required to pass this examination in order to graduate and become a ylioppilas. The Matriculation Examination tests everything you have learned during the 3 years of upper secondary and consists of a minimum of 5 written exams and 1 listening comprehension one, though many students end up going through at least 6-7 written exams and 1-2 listening comprehension exams. Each written exam lasts for 6 hours and all of them contain only essay-based questions, foreign language exams being an exception on this (they include shorter questions, shorter essays and even some multiple choice). Listening comprehension exams last for a couple of hours. So, essentially, 6 times 6 hours and then some. You can imagine students will be pretty tired by the end of it all, especially when teachers tend to also hold practice exams to prepare them - these practice exams also last for 6 hours, providing the 'authentic feel'. I know I was tired of it all before even getting to the actual Matriculation Examination exams. My butt was pre-numbed for the occasion.

If all goes well and you pass, you will get your student cap and you are free to apply to higher education: Yliopisto (university) or ammattikorkeakoulu. Sometimes people choose to even go back and attend a vocational school instead. But I’m not here to talk about that, I’m just going to cover the university side of things.

In order to get into university, you have to go through an application exam. That’s right, after that hellish series of butt-numbing exams, there are more exams to go through. There is one for each major and each university. If you were to apply to study, well, say, archaeology and you apply to study it at University A, University B, and University C, it means you will still have three separate application exams you have to go through, despite it being all for one major. If you are lucky, some of the universities might have the same exam material (usually a nice hefty book or two) though - they sometimes decide to coordinate this out of mercy towards future students. There are some majors (I.e. geography, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics) that accept people without application exams, if they have done really well at the Matriculation Examination of a particular subject, but a lot of people do not do well enough, so they too are stuck with the application exams. What makes things more challenging in the ‘getting-in’ business is also the fact that, you are directly competing to get in: Each major at each university usually accepts only 9-20 (10 being a common number here as I've witnessed) new students per year, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of applicants for each major at each university. Hence, getting in is not a given in any field. With law and medical school things are further complicated by this strange law that you can only apply to one law and one medical school, ever.

On to discuss university! Usually once you get accepted, you will have the right to study at that university for 7 years. Now, I have very little idea about how degrees other than humanities ones work, besides than knowing that they are more strictly scheduled and generally get more done than I feel like I ever do, so I’m not really going to cover anything outside of my “jurisdiction”, so to speak. I will be sticking to a degree in humanities, and how I perceive it to work.

Here’s how it works: You are in. Go nuts. Do what ever you want. It’s all on you. No one is going to tell you what classes to take beyond a small set of major-specific basic courses. You will need a certain amount of credits to get a degree though, and you do need to go through certain sets of courses, but basically it’s all up to you to get them scraped together, no one is going to look after you on that (unless you happen to become friendly with a lecturer, who then starts to worry about you if they don‘t see you shuffling down the corridors apathetically every now and then). For me, this plentiful freedom continues to be a bit of an anxiety-causing fact in our field, especially when I feel like I can’t gather together enough credits. I’ve grown jealous of sciences and their stricter schedules, first of all, they actually have schedules, and they get more credits on courses. But I digress…

The speed with which you achieve your Bachelor’s degree completely depends on your own studying speed in humanities, but usually it takes 2-3 years to get a B.A. of Humanities (which comes equipped with an M.A. in philosophy, I don‘t know how, don‘t ask, it says in my papers I‘m doing a B.A. in humanities and M.A. in philosophy, I do not question it, nor should you). After that it gets more fuzzy. It all depends a lot on your own chosen pace. Getting to MA might take around a couple of years. I’m not sure, I haven’t figured that out yet. Basically I’m of no help what so ever on things beyond B.A.. It’s like asking me what being dead feels like. No idea, I’ll let you know when I get there. Oh no wait, I can’t, I’m dead.

That's about it from me, really.

P.S. I feel like this is important to mention but I couldn’t fit it smoothly into any of the paragraphs above, so here it is: Our university’s course grading system goes from 1 to 5, 1 being the same as F (fail). Oh, and your grade has nothing to do with the amount of credits you will get, so long as you pass you are good.

P.P.S. The image above the text is The lyre of Apollo, the symbol of an upper secondary graduate, ylioppilas. There is a golden lyre cockade on the student caps of the graduates and it is tradition that graduates also buy their mothers a golden brooch of the same symbol. Also, the silhouette of Apollo’s head is the insignia of The National Matriculation Examination Board (the organizers of the Matriculation Examination exams). Bit of an Apollo fixation, yes.

*** (Yeah, remember seeing these three asterisks earlier in the text? Me neither. But whaddayaknow, they actually had a purpose!) For foreign (exchange) students, there is also a tuition fee of 3000€ (same for every university). This is a new thing that they began to implement only a couple of years ago, saying it is merely a trial of sorts. I don’t know if it is a permanent arrangement, but Finnish students and like-minded people greatly oppose this for a variety of reasons, one being pride over free education and the equality it provides.

- Mia/sterling