From the construction of basic public services to the wave of high technology. The quantitative development of Finnish academic fields of education from the 1950s to the 2010s

Authors

• Matti Salo Oulun yliopisto

Abstract

There have been considerable structural changes in the fields of education in the Finnish university sector during recent decades. Changes in the society and its needs have required adjustments in different fields, and the strong governmental control on the university sector has provided good opportunities to this planning. The article presents a statistical examination of the eight largest fields of education based on the numbers of new students, derived from university statistics and databases. The changes are analysed by means of the most essential planning documents and publications. Finally, the change in the fields of education in the university sector is examined on the more general level of study field groups, and the results are correlated with findings from earlier studies. The wave of constructing basic public services from the 1950s to the latter part of the 1960s can be considered one of the main phases. It included a strong increase in the number of students in subject teacher education and social sciences during the construction phase of the welfare society. The higher education development act (1966) started the first development wave of economics and technology, which was manifested in the growing numbers of new students in the fields of engineering, economics and natural sciences. The small-scale national health wave helped to raise health services to a high level in an international perspective in the 1970s. The last great wave is the high technology wave, started in the 1980s and extending to the 2000s, which consisted of a quite strong engineering wave till the millennium, after which the wave subsided a bit, to continue as a marketing/commercialisation wave.