Tero Kankaanperä

Three Years

I’ve been the secretary general of the student union for three years now. It’s time to give up the job for the next one. Compared to some of the people who have held the position I’m still a novice. There have been seven and even 13-year-term at the “office”. I can only wonder how those persons held out for so long, since the job is rather draining. At the current situation the three-year-term has still been enough to make me the one to have held my position second longest among my colleagues.

The last three years have been extremely interesting and challenging. It has been the best – or the worst – part of the term of office of the current government. The higher education system and the universities in particular have been under the microscope and many fundamental principles have been re-evaluated. The student unions have been fighting for anything and everything simultaneously and successively: for how long do we have the right to study at a university, do we have to pay for the right, is there going to be limitations to what we are allowed to study, how are we going to fund our studies…

The two founding principles of the Finnish educational system, freedom from charges and unlimited right to study, have been under threat and haven been partially lost. The shift from seeing higher education as a continuation of the fundamental right to free education to seeing it as a exploitable commodity has been most remarkable. The decisions leading to this development may have been made earlier but the implementation has taken place during the last three years. The consequences will be seen in a decade or two.

The major setback of these three years has been the introduction of limits to the formerly unlimited right to hold a right to study. The harsh initial proposal was fortunately successfully watered down so that the actual restrictions imposed on students became rather lame. Nevertheless the principle was lost and it opened a can of worms that will bring a continuous threat to the student unions: when will those restrictions be opened again for discussion about tightening them.

The fight for the second pillar still continues: education is free of charge for all. How long this is going to last is an other question. What is now proposed now to students coming from outside EU and EEA could be true to all students in the future. It’s again more a question of a principle than of anything else. The outlook behind tuition fees in education is completely alien to Finnish system. It is not simply a question of the sum but of the whole economics of education. Introduction of tuition fees to Finnish educational system would also be a key point to all other welfare services. It opens the possibility of re-evaluating the position of other services now regarded as welfare services. It’s rather frightful thought that in only three years the very foundation of the Finnish higher education could be taken apart.

Even the legitimacy of student unions has been called into question. While defending its members interests against threats from outside, the student unions have been forced to fight another battle within. This expresses a lack of ability to demonstrate the usefulness, efficiency and influence of the student unions to their members. Somewhere on the way we’ve lost the idea that the student union is the sum of its members. At least our members don’t seem to feel that way. Somewhere among the next fights the student unions need to find time to redeem the commitment of their members. This is imperative since the student unions are the strongest and sometimes the only force to promote the interests of students and youth. If we don’t have the support of our members we can’t do it.