Sharp rise in foreign PhD enrolments in Scandinavia

Almost 17,000 foreign students are studying for PhDs in the five Nordic countries. These students comprise a significant proportion of the more than 70,000 foreigners enrolled in higher education, and their numbers have more than doubled since 2005.

Foreign students accounted for 37% of newly enrolled doctoral candidates in Sweden in 2011 and 24% in Denmark, both representing steep rises over the previous decade.

The proportion of foreigners awarded a doctorate in 2011 was 33% in Norway, 29% in Denmark, 22% in Sweden and 14% in Finland. Iceland awarded 51 doctoral degrees that year: 19 to foreigners, or 38% of the total.

Across Scandinavia, the overall number of doctoral degrees conferred increased by 32% between 2002 and 2011, whereas the number of foreigners awarded a PhD jumped by an astonishing 121% in the same period.

Altogether, 51,500 doctoral degrees were awarded in the Nordic countries over that time, and nearly 12,000 were presented to foreign students. More than half (54%) of the latter, however, did not remain in the country where they had earned their doctorates.

As is the situation in many other European countries, the story of foreigners enrolled in doctoral studies in Scandinavia parallels the expansion in the number of foreign students undertaking lesser degrees.

Norway

In Norway, a recent study by the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education found that up to 50% of foreign-born PhD students left the country soon after graduation.

While two years after completing their PhDs as many as 65% of Western Europeans were still living in Norway, only 40% of those from Latin America and 20% from Africa stayed on.

Since 2000, some 50 foreign doctorate-holders on average have left Norway each year, although after 2006 the number of annual departures doubled. This has led some Norwegians to complain about the rising number of foreigners leaving and taking locally earned PhDs with them.

But Norway’s Minister of Education Kristin Halvorsen, writing in the major newspaper Dagens Næringsliv, argued that the recruitment of foreign doctoral students, notably from developing nations, was a kind of “pay-back time” for the thousands of Norwegian students who had studied abroad since World War II.

Halvorsen was referring to the fact that in the 1950s, 30% of all Norwegian students were studying abroad, while in 2013, 23,000 were enrolled in other countries – compared to the 204,000 studying in Norway.

Since the mid-1990s, Norway has provided 1,100 loans annually to students from developing countries enrolled in Norwegian higher education, and 30% of these students go on to complete a doctorate. If they leave Norway, the loan is converted to a grant.

In addition to the fact that Norway is the only Nordic country besides Iceland that has not imposed tuition fees, a majority of Norway’s citizens support the notion of “pay-back-time”, as Halvorsen called it. Also, there has been little debate on the Nordic Institute report and few proposals to stem the brain drain from Norway.

Yet Norwegian industry relies on foreign graduates to fill many of its job vacancies.

Professor Jann Rune Ursin from Stavanger University said that among 104 applicants for a grant position in research on natural gas, not one was a Norwegian, while 56 were from Iran, eight from India, five from China, five from Nigeria, seven from Pakistan and the rest from Europe.

“The best applicant is selected and normally this is a foreign citizen,” Ursin told University World News. “Norwegians today benefit by entering the oil sector directly with an MSc degree because our companies do not recognise a PhD in their recruitment policy.

“My impression is that foreign doctoral candidates remain in the oil sector for many years after graduating.

“Until Norwegian industry recognises the importance of a PhD and compensates for that in salaries, Norwegian universities will not be able to recruit the most talented MSc candidates for a doctorate.”

Rune Nilsen, a professor of international health at the University of Bergen and coordinator of the 2004-05 European University Assocation's Doctoral Programmes Project, said there were too few positions for doctorates linked to the professional sciences at Norway’s traditional universities and very few grants were linked to sectors in high demand.

“Many of the doctoral candidates are recruited for programmes in which Norway has a contractual obligation that they return to their home countries after graduation and not, as happens in the US, where they are stealing the brains from poor countries,” Nilsen said.

Sweden

In Sweden, the number of foreign doctoral students rose from 587 in 2000 to nearly 2,600 in 2011, a proportionate increase from 13%-37% of all those admitted. Similarly, in 2000, 15% of the students graduating with a PhD were foreign-born, rising to 22% in 2011.

Based on a 2007 study, it is estimated that out of 22,000 doctorate degrees awarded in Sweden from 2002-11, up to 6,000 of the students were foreign-born and that 3,500 of them had probably left the country within two years after graduation.

As in Norway, there has been little debate among the Swedes as to whether this is an encouraging development or not.

But what is of concern is that the introduction in 2011 of tuition fees for students from outside Europe is likely to drive down the number of talented foreigners starting a masters degree in Sweden and then completing a doctorate, notably in technological fields and the natural sciences.

Professor Anders Flodstrøm of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and a board member of the European Institute of Technology, said that for technical, medical and natural science PhDs, an academic career was not the dominant one even though postgraduates were prepared for an academic career.

In fact, 70% of PhDs were employed in markets other than academe, such as in industry and healthcare.

In Denmark, 10,000 PhDs were awarded in the decade to 2011, 19% to foreign students. But the percentage of foreign-born students among those starting a doctorate more than doubled – from 13% in 2002 to 29% in 2011. Almost a third of those enrolled in technological sciences and the natural sciences were foreign citizens.

The Danish Governmental Audit Organisation Riksrevisionen investigated this and in 2011 wrote a report stating: “An increasing proportion of foreign-born doctorate degree holders are leaving Denmark after graduation. There is hence a risk that Denmark’s universities, to an increasing degree, are delivering highly qualified personnel to other countries and becoming a net exporter of PhDs.”

Finland has not experienced the flood of foreign students into its universities or into doctoral programmes that other nations have. Of the 1,653 doctoral degrees conferred in 2011, only 237 or 14% were awarded to foreigners – a proportion that has been stable since 2000.

Catching up with America?

Discussing the likelihood of Scandinavian countries catching up with America in terms of attracting bright foreign students, Maurits van Rooijen, rector of the London School of Business, told University World News that this was happening “but tediously slowly!

“One of the key success factors for the top American universities is their ability to act as magnets for academic talent and a very high percentage is foreign-born. This has been a major boost to academic output and to US global rankings,” Van Rooijen said.

“Although the Scandinavian numbers suggest a positive trend, the reality is they are still many years away from being able to play in the premier league.”