While the public nature of the secondary education in Finland is praised, the universities are under increasing privatization pressures. Finnish high schools have become world-famous for their lack of tuition fees, fairly non-hierarchic atmosphere and the relative freedom of teachers. For the universities, however, many key decision-makers have been offering privatization, tuition fees, army-style command structures and increasingly strict time control over teachers.

I have a very simple hypothesis about one of the reasons for this tensions. It is the seeming incapacity to read rankings. This incapacity seems to characterize a significant number of the people in charge of the Finnish educational system. Continue reading →