Education export is growing

The students of the first international made-to-order Master’s Programme at their graduation in Hanoi. In the front row in red festive costumes Markku Sotarauta, Harri Melin and Lasse Oulasvirta from the University of Tampere.

The first University of Tampere Master’s Programme to be taught abroad concluded in August with 38 Vietnamese Masters of Administrative Science receiving their diplomas in public-sector economics.

The School of Management has now made preliminary agreements with four other Vietnamese universities for exporting educational know-how in administrative sciences. Co-operation is also being developed in research and student exchange.

– The numbers of international students are growing all the time. We have got good experience of how to do a Master’s Programme internationally and we can make the English language education available in Finland too, says Lasse Oulasvirta, Professor of Financial Administration and Public Sector Accounting.

– This is exactly the exporting of expertise and intangible services that everyone is talking about.

The two-year programme was mainly taught at the state-owned National Academy of Public Administration according to the rules of the University of Tampere. The programme also included a one-month study period in Tampere.

At the moment Vietnam is making its higher education more international and it is important to the country that its public administrators are taught according to the Finnish higher education standards.

– They get new ideas from us and can develop their administration, Oulasvirta says.

The biggest made-to-order programme

The Master’s Programme in public-sector economics is the first, but definitely not the last, made-to-order programme abroad.

This autumn the University has started a working group on educational exports led by Vice-Rector Harri Melin.

– We will engage in exporting our own key areas of educational expertise. These are, for example, public administration and finance, health sciences and extension studies for teachers. The intention is to build a few Master’s and extension study programmes which we will then start to market, says Melin.

Exporting education is not the University’s core activity and it is still new to everyone in the University.

– It is a rather small-scale operation financially. Educational exports help the University to develop and become more international.

Studies that have been organised abroad have previously been research-based extension studies and the responsibility for setting them up has rested on the activity of just a few individuals and units.

The question of educational exports is tied in with the controversial issue of tuition fees. According to the Universities Act, a Finnish university is not allowed to make the students pay directly for education that leads to a degree. In the Master’s Programme conducted in Vietnam, the students did not pay for their education; it was provided by the Government of Vietnam and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

This story was originally published in Finnish in Aikalainen 11/2012