Some Observations on Higher Education in Sweden: A University System Adjusts to the Demands of an Advanced Industrial Society
SINCE the end of the Second World War the number of students in Swedish higher education has quadrupled. Sweden and Finland L are probably the only countries in western Europe where almost iS per cent of an age-group now enter a higher educational institution. Yet in spite of this enormous growth in college attendance, a more specific, more elite orientation continues to be characteristic of Swedish as compared with American higher education. Following the pattern in Europe, Swedish universities have made virtually no attempt to provide general education and vocational training for those who will be engaged in middle-status occupations-salesman, farmer, merchant, and so on. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the universities have been the major vehicle of mobility into the upper levels of society because they have functioned to train the dominant official elites. These were the public administrators of this highly centralized nation, the clergy of the State Church, the professors and the Gymnasium teachers. They were trained by the law, theology, and liberal-arts faculties respectively. As recently as 1959, 70 per cent of those with academic degrees were employed by national or local government. The medical faculties, the fourth of the faculties inherited from the Middle Ages, trained the doctors, the most important non-official elite group. The traditionally great prestige of higher education in Sweden derives essentially from its function of training only for occupations of the highest status. Not until the I950's did the universities add any faculties to the traditional four. All of the specialists demanded by increasing industrialization and higher standards of living were trained outside the universities at specialized institutions. In this respect, Swedish universities have been more conservative than those of other European countries, many of which have established colleges of dentistry, engineering, commerce, agriculture, and veterinary medicine. The Swedish universities remained faithful to the ideals of research and scholarship characteristic of the nineteenth-century German model in the traditional fields of