Yesterday, the Admission Inquiry was presented and SFS chairwoman Caroline Sundberg participated in a panel discussion and was allowed to comment on the inquiry's proposal directly to the investigator Jörgen Tholin. For a year, the inquiry has worked to propose a new system for eligibility and selection for higher education.
SFS is generally positive to the Access Inquiry and will submit a consultation response in the future. During yesterday's panel discussion, I emphasized the importance of an access system with more paths to higher education - early strategic choices should not be decisive for who gets access to higher education. Instead, the system should be designed so that those who are most suitable, ie motivated, are accepted. The system should not exclude anyone who has the prerequisites to complete a higher education. It is positive that the inquiry makes several proposals that lead in precisely that direction.
One of the proposals is to abolish the credit points for mathematics and modern languages. A major problem with today's system of credit points is that students who do not make the right choice early in life significantly impair their chances of entering a university education. The consequence will be that many opt out of upper secondary school courses they are actually interested in if those courses do not give credit points, ie that the thirst for knowledge may give way to tactics. However, it is not the access system to higher education's task to solve the lack of interest in certain courses in upper secondary school. The problem of lack of interest should be solved where it arises, not in competition for a place in higher education. It is also known that students who come from home accustomed to study are more likely to make early strategic choices than students from home accustomed to study. Hopefully, the new proposal can to some extent counteract the skewed recruitment that the credit points today lead to.
The inquiry also proposes to introduce an entrance examination for anyone who has not completed or completed a high school education with a university entrance examination. The idea is that the entrance exam can be done by people who do not have a high school education as well as people with a foreign high school education without grades in Swedish. During the panel discussion, I expressed that the entrance exam is a good solution, as it is a uniform and clear path to higher education for those who currently do not have an entrance exam. However, it is important that the entrance examination is completely free of charge for the individual, as it corresponds to the upper secondary school's qualifying education, which is currently free of charge for the individual.
The proposal that received the most attention yesterday is about introducing a 19-year limit for the university entrance exam. The basic idea of the test was to broaden recruitment to higher education as a second chance. Today, the test does not fulfill this function. The proposals in the investigation give the test a limited significance and it goes back to a second chance, after the first chance. We welcome the proposals. It is not only a proposal for an age limit, it is also a proposal to reduce the minimum level of the selection group from one third to 15%. This means that other selection groups will be larger. Will it be harder to be accepted? With a larger selection of grades and alternative selection, the higher education institutions will need to figure out more what skills are actually needed to be able to take on an education. In other words, there are several things that change and that are connected. The upper secondary school and the grades from it will become more important, but there will still be several ways in to be accepted. The future will show how it turns out in practice.
So far, we have found more positive parts in the investigation than negative ones. Now we sit down and read the investigation more carefully. We will return with more detailed comments after the proposal has been sent out for consultation.
Caroline Sundberg, chairman
The access investigation can be read here: “Access for beginners - a more open and simpler system for access to higher education” (SOU 2017: 20)