Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1007/s11162-025-09855-5

Publication Title

Research in Higher Education

Volume

66

Issue

6

Pages

34 (1-38)

Abstract

In 2017, Finland began levying tuition fees on non-European Union (EU)/European Economic Area (EEA) international students. Using data from multiple Finnish government sources, we study the impact of tuition fee reform at various stages of the higher education enrollment selection process. Outcomes examined include how the policy change affects student application behavior, admissions and acceptances by institutions, and student enrollments. To identify the effects of the policy change, we employ a difference-in-differences approach using national register data and program-level tuition variations. Our findings led to three key findings: (1) the implementation of fees did not decrease the number of applications of international students subject to fees to Finnish higher education institutions, but it did induce a decrease in the admitted, accepted, and enrolled international student populations; (2) there was an increase in the proportion of fee-paying international students from the wealthiest countries and a decrease from the less wealthy countries; (3) less wealthy students were incentivized to earn more credits in their first year of study after the introduction of tuition fees. We provide a discussions of the implications for policy and practice and recommendations for future research.

Rights

© The Authors 2025.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder

Data Availability

Article states: "Data for this paper is highly restricted and owned by the Finnish government. We are unable to release this data for sharing. We are happy to provide full information on how data may be obtained, which variables were used, and our selection criteria for use in the study. Please contact corresponding author for information on this issue."

ORCID

0000-0003-1868-444X (Mathies)

Original Publication Citation

Mathies, C., Karhunen, H., & DesJardins, S. L. (2025). If you charge them, will they come? The effect of levying tuition fees on international students. Research in Higher Education, 66(6), 1-38, Article 34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-025-09855-5

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