"Your time as a student here will be some of the best years of your life.”
For a growing number of international students, this phrase, told to them at the start of their time in Finland, is at risk of becoming a lie. Amid old issues of integration and isolation, the growing threat of labour exploitation is now emerging.
This rise in part stems from student numbers. Compared to 2016, the last year without tuition fees, in 2025 there were close to double the number of non-EU/EEA students in Finland, with around 26,000 between universities and universities of applied sciences. For TEK related degrees, a similar rise was seen from around 2,500 to 6,000.
Tuition fee-liable student numbers increasing was perhaps inevitable considering ministerial guidance for institutions to broaden their income sources. Unfortunately, it was allowed to happen with far too little oversight.
The stories of foreign agents lying to get people to move to Finland have been common. In addition, factors such as available affordable housing have been insufficiently considered, not to mention the local labour market situations. With the student already in Finland, prevention measures struggle to find and stop exploitation, especially when international students may not have received sufficient labour market information to spot abuse.
Costs being higher and income lower than expected is a recipe for financial poverty and therefore exploitation. TEK’s Student Survey finding earlier this year that over half of non-EU/EEA respondents had serious worries about their financial situation in the near future portrays how widespread this threat is.
Policy makers have flung open the doors without checking the room within was ready. Worse, without a long-term strategy for international students, different government ideologies have negatively compounded to increase the exploitation potential.
Already, we are seeing the international student numbers fall, the job market combined with restrictive immigration polices making Finland less attractive as a destination. In the short-term this will help the situation, but what will the long-term impacts be?
We must do more than temporarily push shut the door. We need better oversight, employment prospects and training. Most of all, we need long-term thinking to find the long-term answer: how should international students fit into the story of Finland’s future?
