Bye-bye international students?

The academic world in Sweden is in shock. Several top researches in Sweden has called on the government to delay the plans to introduce fees for students from third countries (third countries being defined as those from outside of the European Union and the European Economic Area). Denmark is often cited with their 90% drop in students when they introduced tuition fees for foreign students in 2006. It is believed that the same will happen in Sweden.

It will.

Unless we take the situation seriously and act accordingly, learning from our colleagues in Denmark. If we look at the Technical University of Denmark, they had about 230 international students in their master programs in 2005, falling to just above 100 in 2006 when the tuition fees were introduced. Yet today, the number of international students are more than they were in 2005. We don't seem to be talking about a permanent decline.

It's also important to note that we're talking about charging tuition fees from students from outside of the EU/EEA, unless there is a student exchange program between a Swedish university and a non-EU/EEA university. If there is such an agreement, students would be covered by the same fees as EU/EEA applicants. So why is everyone so scared?

Because it changes the playing field, and this is scary.

No longer will Sweden be able to attract students from third countries only by our low (non-existent) tuition fees, but we would have to compete on the same terms as any other country. Scary thought, right?

It is, if you're unprepared. Swedish universities have had plenty of time to prepare, but so far little seem to be done, and most people seem to be resigned to accept that many programs will have to be shut down because they will lose 90% of their students.

Except that the 90% drop, as we saw by studying DTU, doesn't need to be 90%, and it's not inconceivable that it could be significantly less. But what did DTU do, in order to overcome this difficulty (remember, DTU probably had less time to prepare for this than Swedish universities have had)?

They turned from admission to recruitment.

Instead of wading through thousands of applications, they had to go out and actively recruit students. It's a reversal of the roles, and they had to learn how to do this the hard way. They established exchange programs with more universities in a focused approach to allow foreign students an easy access to DTU through their universities.

DTU is finding their new recruitment ground in growing economies and through high ranked universities and students with financial support or who would be interested in the Danish labour market. In the European countries, DTU recruits generally from Poland, France, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria and Germany. From my experience from DTU I know that despite their focus on only Bulgaria and Poland in Eastern Europe, they have a significant number of students coming to them from Eastern Europe.

There is an opportunity for Swedish universities to come out on top here, but we can only do that if we make that our goal. If we sit back and wait for the 90% drop of students, we will probably lose much more than 90% of the students. We need to be pro-active, and turn, like DTU, from admission to recruitment. We need to form strong alliances with universities in third countries, as well as recruiting strategies to recruit people to study in Sweden.

Swedish universities have the excellence required to compete, and we have a strong base for recruitment in the Eastern European countries. Let's make Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia our new recruitment base. It requires a conscious effort in this direction, but it definitely beats the alternative: doing nothing.