The government’s scholarship programs should cover 15 percent of fee-paying students. But the size of the fees has been misjudged.
The scholarship money that the university has gotten will cover only 18 of the 2,000 non-Europeans who want to study in Lund this fall.
“This depletes the supply of programs and the diversity,” pro vice chancellor Eva Åkesson said.
Around 2,000 fee-paying students have paid application fees to Lund University. But the scholarship funds that the university gets from the state only cover 18 average study fees.
“It is quite a small amount of money and it is far from sufficient,” said Lund University pro vice chancellor Eva Åkesson. “The consequences are that we cannot get the international education and environment that we want to have at the university.”
“Swedish students won’t meet international students to the same extent. We lose both breadth and depth in the education and miss the exciting and important discussions that a global classroom can give.”
Eva Åkesson also sees a risk in that the supply of programs could decrease when the university receives fewer resources.
Ninety million
In the government’s fee proposition, the importance of scholarships is emphasized in order to counteract a decrease in the numbers of students from countries outside the EES and Switzerland. According to Eva-Marie Byberg, Jan Björklund’s press secretary, the government’s funds will cover scholarships for 15 percent of fee-paying students in Sweden.
”SEK Ninety million are reserved for scholarships every year, that should be able to correspond to about 1,500 students,” she wrote in an e-mail to Lundagård.
“Must cover all the costs”
But the size of the scholarship investment was established before the universities had set their tuitions. The government’s estimation is based on an average tuition of about SEK 60,000. At Lund University, the average tuition comes out to about 125,000 crowns. According to Eva Åkesson, the prices at other Swedish universities lie about at the same level.
“We must cover all the costs, which means that we have to include costs for housing and marketing, among other things. We end up on that level. The government has simply not thought of that,” said Eva Åkesson. She says that the university was never approached about how high tuition would be.
“The tuition reforms were instituted in great haste and without a consequence-analysis,” she said. “This is another example of that.”
According to Eva-Marie Byberg, the government’s estimation is based on the payment that the universities get for every Swedish student.
”The system with fees and scholarships is instituted first in the fall and we will of course follow the development,” she wrote. ”Ninety million per year is a lot of money.”
Increases in price
Lundagård has written before that certain faculties have set a higher price on their educations than what they actually cost. Eva Åkesson admits that scholarship money would cover more students if the prices were set lower.
“But the faculty who have done these price increases judged that an investment in quality was needed there,” she said.
“If you stretched it, we could offer more students scholarships by running cheap programs with halved education times, and so on. But that would correspond to bad quality, and I believe that it is the wrong way to go,” she continued.
Translation: Samantha Sunne
