Finland: Satisfaction guaranteed! A tale of two systems

Abstract

Whereas the trend in many countries has been towards merging former teaching institutions with each other and with existing universities to form new universities (such as in Australia and the UK), in Finland, a new higher education subsector has been created to become the second branch of Finnish higher education. Finland’s polytechnics have existed for a mere 20 years, having been created from myriad small vocational teaching institutions. Therefore, Finland has a new academic group responding to the needs of a set of nonuniversity institutions, and it is relevant to consider the attributes of these polytechnic academics, compared with the attributes of equivalent cohorts of university academics. Results….