From The Chronicles of Higher Education, October 7, 1992
Conservatives increase budgets and enrollment and offer a blueprint for regulation
Sweden’s conservative-led government is making good on its pledge to revitalize the country's higher-education system. Since taking office one year ago, the right-of-center coalition government has increased the annual budget for higher education by 10 percent, or about $100 million, and has added a total of 6,000 new places for undergraduate students. More important, it has drafted a comprehensive blueprint for deregulating and decentralizing the country's tightly controlled network of six universities and 29 colleges. The plan, which the government will submit to the Riksdag or parliament, this week, is the talk of the campuses here. Among other things, the proposed legislation returns to individual universities and colleges decision-making authority in admissions, curriculum, hiring, promotion, and the use of resources. "Anything that is not expressly regulated can be decided at a local level by the individual university or college, the legislation states. It also gives students more flexibility in what fields they study, and contains Sweden's first officially codified guarantee of academic freedom since the 1800’s. "In a word, we are opening up the universities,” says Leif Lindfors, the Assistant Under Secretary for Higher Education and one of the chief architects of the restructuring. "'Our new motto is accessibility.”
Widespread Political Support
The plan, which incorporates ideas proposed by the national students' and faculty unions, has widespread political support and is expected to quickly pass into law, probably by the end of next month. Implementing the reforms will become the responsibility of a Swedish-American academic who has been hired to head the revamped system. Stig Hagstrom, who had been a Stanford University professor of materials science since 1986, began a six-year term as chancellor of Sweden’s university system last week. A graduate of the University of Uppsala, he says the planned changes will bring healthy competition to higher education here. I believe in competition, Mr. Hagstrom says. "Competition brings better students. It also breeds diversity. The legislation represents the biggest change in Swedish higher education since the mid-1970's when the ruling Social Democrats instituted a highly centralized system known as högskola. Under that plan, the education of undergraduates was reorganized along rigid curricular lines designed to lead to clearly defined careers, and responsibility for decisions on matters academic as well as financial was transferred from the campuses to Stockholm. Those changes were intended to make the country's campuses more open to children of working-class parents, but statistics have shown that the reforms had just the opposite effect. The proportion of university students with parents who are “ordinary workers" has declined since högskola was instituted in 1977. Observers here generally agree that the quality of the entire university system declined under högskola (The Chronicle, December 4, 1991). The Social Democrat administration that was ousted in last year's elections actually had been taking steps to fix the high-er-education system when it was turned out of office. The new government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the head of the Moderate Party and the first conservative to lead the country in more than six decades, came to office pledging to reconstruct "the academic estate" and make Swedish education the best in Europe. Even given such bold promises, the Bildt government "is clearly running much faster, and much further, than anyone had anticipated,” says Annika Ekstrom, the education editor of Svenska Dagbladet, a Stockholm daily.
Diluting the Bureaucracy
The government moved quickly to scale down the bureaucracy in Stockholm, which was seen by many here as contributing to the university system's problems. A number of agencies have been abolished, including the Center for Planning and Co- ordination, the Planning and Equipment Board for Universities and Colleges, and six regional-assistance councils. Those involved in education matters have been impressed by the stirring language the new legislation uses to explain its rationale for decentralizing and deregulating the higher-education system. "There are two essential motives for dissociating higher education from the state,” the bill says. "The first is that a progressive advancement of knowledge requires freedom, independence, and competition. The second motive is one of principle: A society which supports diversity and which is aware of an all-embracing state authority must safeguard the crucial counterbalances, among which are free universities and university colleges.” The six universities that anchor the system are at Göteborg, Linköping, Lund, Stockholm, Umeà, and Uppsala. The 29 “university colleges” are roughly equivalent to U.S. junior colleges. The 4,000 undergraduate places added this fall combined with 2.000 added last spring bring total enrollment in the system to 169,000. Providing more places in higher education has been a pressing need in Sweden as well as a chief demand of the national students' union. Admission continues to be highly competitive, with more than three applicants for every place. This year the number of applicants hit a record 92,000. The graduation rate, however, has been declining. Between 12,000 and 13,000 undergraduate degrees have been awarded in each of several recent years, down significantly from between 16,000 and 17,000 a year in the early 1970's.
Report Questions Quality
Such statistics led to a nationwide consensus that change was needed, and allowed the new government to act decisively to try to halt the system's decline. The government also was spurred into action by the release last spring of a report by a blue-ribbon committee of academic leaders that found the quality of teaching and research in several subject areas to be "unacceptably low.” The ambitious university reform is another way the Bildt government is delivering on its promise to make education a central feature of its plan for economic growth. "Increasing the number of university graduates and raising standards in education and research will be crucial for Sweden in the future,” wrote Per Unckel, a highly regarded conservative politician who is now Minister of Education, in his introduction to the higher-education legislation. "Only through advanced education and research can Sweden hold its own against tough international competition. The legislation -actually more like a manifesto, with many of the particulars to be worked out later- calls for the complete revamping of the lines of authority between Stockholm and the campus-es. Individual institutions will be responsible for monitoring their own educational quality, and a yet-to-be-named national education secretariat will monitor quality throughout the system. Telling administrators who are used to deferring to Stockholm to think for themselves is one thing, but getting them to do it is quite another. The question facing higher education today is whether the system's quality can be maintained and upgraded under the chaotic conditions certain to attend deregulation. Mr. Hagstrom, the new chief, says it can. "In the past, there has been too much stress on equality,” he says. "Now there will be greater stress on quality. Before, there was too much talk about how to do things, as opposed to what things we were doing.”
He says he hopes that the revamped system will help remedy Sweden’s “'negative intellectual
balance of trade" by making it more attractive for top scholars to remain in the country, and by attracting more students and scholars from abroad. He also intends to address the issue of declining teaching quality and standards by making it more difficult for research-minded professors to "buy their way out of teaching”. "I hope to bring the joy of teaching back to the Swedish system,” says Mr. Hagstrom. "This is another thing we have tended to take for granted.” Mr. Hagstrom says he is not sure how the legislation's most controversial clause, which calls for some institutions to fall under a new form of non-state control, will turn out. "I don't think we can have private colleges as you do in the U.S.),” he says. "The money isn't there. Private higher education is virtually nonexistent in Sweden; the one independent college is heavily subsidized by the state.
Privatization Opposed
The powerful faculty and students’ unions, which otherwise support the new legislation, are opposed to any effort to privatize higher education, in part because it might diminish their influence. "We think there should be less policy,” says David Samuelson, vice-president of the national students' union, "but there should still be some policy. Nevertheless, we think the new plan is essentially a good one.” So does the faculty union. "'It's an excellent blueprint,” says Bengt Gustafson, the union's negotiator. However, he says faculty members would like to see the government put even more money into the system. The government proposes to spend a total of $3.6-billion on higher education over the next three years. Mr. Hagstrom is optimistic: “We will be competitive again.”