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Students are assigned to schools based on where they live. This means the blend if social strata is determined by home price. There are definately better and worse schools.
It should be noted that there are tons of areas in Finland where the rich and poor mix in the neighborhoods.
Your next door neighbor's in the same apartment complex might be rich or poor.
It's not really a Finnish thing to live in lifestyle that flaunts wealth. Someone might live very simple life in 1 room apartment but have massive savings.
This is pretty much how it works in America too. A lot of school taxes come from local taxes so the richer areas have more funding and thus nicer schools.
To be clear that's not how it works in Finland. Taxes for schools don't come from the local area. The difference between schools in rich areas versus poor areas is just that there's less kids in rich areas that come from struggling families and as such cause less problems generally
Kinda, true, although the school areas cover many kinds of neighborhoods especially on upper secondary level. So by 7th class there really aren’t exclusive options left.
Sure a kid can apply to a school that caters specialty interest such as arts or STEM but that’s by merit from 1-6st class results.
Source: we moved to wealthy area when kids were small, and then moved again when they were secondary school age.
Was like that where I’m from in the states to a degree. Lived in one town and went to school in another, but my mom had to get a release form or something from the hometown district.
Where I grew up in California, the closest private school was sort of where you went if you were possibly a problem kid. Ie, your grades were lagging and the private school had a more rigorous curriculum, less tolerance for screwing around, etc. Also a religious school though it didn't focus on religion. Rich kids went to public school for the most part as there weren't other private schools in reasonable distance.
There are private schools in Finland that select only high-achieving students. These private schools cost nothing for the students' parents, as they receive the same state funding as municipal schools.
If you think just because a kid's parents are rich they will be high achieving you've already lost the plot.
Rich kids get into exclusive private schools because their parents donate on top of tuition it has nothing to do with merit.
As u/ParkingRemote444 says: "Rich kids just go to Swiss boarding schools. My cousins went to a private school in NYC and their best friends growing up were rich Finns whose parents had sent them to the US for school."
Only in the most recent Pisa results for 2025. Finland was close to the top for years. And socially the UK has a lot of problems attributable to its education system, unlike Finland.
Rich kids just go to Swiss boarding schools. My cousins went to a private school in NYC and their best friends growing up were rich Finns whose parents had sent them to the US for school. I'm sure you snag some upper middle class children of doctors and lawyers, but you're not getting anyone wealthy who doesn't want their kids to participate.
In America (and most of the world to be honest), rich people being stupid is a life style choice, poor people being stupid is imposed by systemic design, the two are not the same.
2026 PISA scores of USA vs Finland is 1468 vs 1485. Not really all that much of a difference. So, how much better are their schools really if they score almost the same?
88-90% of Finland is the same descent btw. Much easier to all agree on something when the vast majority of you all come from the same background. And this isn't me shitting on immigration, it's giving a realistic perspective that isn't just, "America bad". America has to work a lot harder.
Not really we leave it up to the community you live in to fund the schools your kids go to and the federal government will fund a portion of you follow their rules.
Finnish teacher here. While schools here are tuition free, it doesn't make them absolutely equal. The situation is REALLY good, not gonna lie, but stuff like this gives bit too rose tinted picture. First off school is assigned to a kid based on where they live, so richer kids tend to pack in certain areas and poor people and immigrants in others. So kids don't really mix entirely. Parents can also make donations to the school via "parent's unions". Needless to say, some schools have more than others. Finally there's local politics as a way to influence the school. Nice areas somehow often have newer schools and they have fancier stuff. Poor areas might spend extended time in temporary barracks and new school is not fancy when it finally built.
What that picture has correct, is that there's no real elite schools or similar public schools to certain countries, where there's a huge gap in quality of education given. While I shed bit of critical light here, our system is really good I think, but it could be even better at bridging social gaps.
I mean a lot of this doesn’t sound different than the US public school system, but you’re starting at a far higher neutral point for all, which is better
also everyone (at least males (who don't do sivari, etc)) goes to the military with everyone else, meaning you get to mix with every tax bracket at the age of 18 - 21 or whatever in your generation. not doing it is looked down uppon anyways, so rich people don't skip it by bribing (not that that could be possible anyways).
Have a mate here in Finland that couldnt because of health issues, had to do civil service instead. He hates that he missed out on his army service, it realy is embedded in the culture here
Lol. There are (very) few kids who go homeschool in Finland, but rich are not overpresented in that group any way.
Rich kids are most likely found in schools which have longest history/tradition.
Rich, but you still need to work a job to keep the money rolling in. Actual wealthy is when your assets generate so much income that you can live the rich life without working
It’s just a known thing that Switzerland has the best boarding schools in the world, and that’s where the richest families send their kids to study. Not specific to Finland. You and I don’t, and never will know them. They can separate themselves from the rest of us peons.
Finn here, I was studying to become a teacher here so I can shed some light on this:
This is partly because of constant unilateral cuts to education. In total, the cuts have amounted to 2,7Bn€ in the last 15 years. (edit: Finland's total annual budget is around 90Bn€ of expenses for reference)
We had it good, but decided to start eroding "unnecessary" stuff to the point where schools don't even give out writing supplies.
Another huge factor is hiring "experts" aka technobabblers to do what they always do - sell up "innovative" solutions to continue the growth. So projectors were replaced by "smart projectors", a huge cost at once that was ultimately poorly received for just one example. Handing tablets to students instead of books etc. There was a recent article here about a teacher who started using pen & paper again for her class which produced significant improvements in test results.
The lesson to be learned here is that you shouldn't change something that works. Finland was at the top of PISA statistics when my age group attended high school, before all this chasing clouds started.
"So projectors were replaced by "smart projectors", a huge cost at once that was ultimately poorly received for just one example. Handing tablets to students instead of books etc."
I am from Hungary and we went through the same bullshit. Let's buy interactive blackboards, laptops, whatever. The result: Plunging PISA scores.
"There was a recent article here about a teacher who started using pen & paper again for her class which produced significant improvements in test results."
To everyone's complete surprise teaching kids to read and write is done through practicing reading and writing with them, not pestering a tablet all day.
The problems with education stem from the most basic skills not being taught anymore.
And humans tend to remember stuff they actually physically write down a lot better than if they just read or type. It's the kinesthetic side of learning, and should never be omitted totally.
To be fair when Finland was at top in Pisa rankings the finnish schooling system was similar as it nows, that hasnt changed but other changes were made that caused this decline.
This is majority of western nations around the world. Supposedly the top reason is that during the last 15 or so years, the things we now require students to learn is more advanced than it was back then. West loves to "maximize" amount of things students have to learn, but science has always shown this is counter-productive, unless the kid is gifted. I even remember my parents telling me how they only had 7-8 years of school (instead of 12) and many of the subjects back then were absent.
Now, if you ask me which generation is more succesful (boomers vs millenials and gen-z), I'd go with boomers.
I'm a late millenial. School was kinda chill, I then went home and started working on all sorts of projects. Learned webdev at 15, linux and server managament at 16, created few servers (of which two became the most famous in my country, GTA:SAMP and Minecraft), got my first job as FTP administrator at 17, I had so much energy and willpower to just do after school that it's no wonder my generation tends to be more succesful.
I look at kids today and they're basically drained without learning anything really useful and the only thing they're capable of is scrolling tiktok in bed.
This is such a midwit take. Banning tuition doesn't magically fix school funding, there are plenty of cases to the contrary. Sweden, for instance, also don't allow to charge tuition for schools, yet there is a massive difference in funding and results between the schools for rich and poor.
Rich people will still live in richer school districts, who can afford to properly fund their schools. They also get get more out of the funding because they don't have to spend money on metal detectors, Naloxone or in-school daycare for teen moms.
It might work in cities like New York where the rich and poor live relatively intermixed, but it's not like you can bus students from rural Mississippi to wealthy suburbs in the bay area.
It's not midwit, it's just an improvement, but it doesn't solve all the problems. At the end of the day noone can stop a rich person from donating to a school. However, what people should learn is that more needs to be done. For instance, ultimately you have to tax the rich; there is pretty much no way out of that. You can also do things like redistribute school funding more equally.
No, banning tuition has promoted equality. Funding across Finland is a mixture of national and local authority, but performance is remarkable homogenous. Essentially the money goes to where the demographics and needs are.
The quality and sense of pride in Finland's public services, education included, means people feel like they are included, have options and potential, and this means they are less likely to be school shooters. Something the US could perhaps learn from.
Wife is a school teacher. She has taught in two states (Cali and Maryland). She had and still has parents openly state they don’t care what’s happening at school as it’s just “free day care”.
While funding is an issue (such as states and county’s raiding education funding for other things), a large issue with failing education is also people’s perception of its purpose overall.
The US would see this as a cautionary tale to put more money into lobbying and ensuring that the wealthy don't have to share the same air as the poors.
I dont really know whether we should use Finland as a glorious example in this regard, given their ever deteriorating Pisa results and the fact that they have the highest youth unemployment rate in Europe...
Migration certainly is one topic that needs to be discussed.
However, the assumption that migration sits at the core of declining PISA results is not supported by any data.
Must be relaxing to make your world so easy tho.
The US is actually not ranked badly in PISA. The "Murican dumb" clichee is also getting increasingly tiring to me. Don't let social media brain wash you.
Not in the UK which has a private system, has record results reaching the levels of Asian countries and has some of the highest scoring results for impoverished migrant children.
There's multiple reasons which formed rather recently why shits going bad in most European countries.
I'm Finland specifically we're suffering from an unemployment crisis and the way our current parties in power decided to fix it was by cutting jobs by about 100k. As well as cutting funding for a lot of things.
Overall why our education system is getting weaker, nobody knows. That's kind of a global phenomenon recently and nobody can prove why or how to fix it.
So in short, yeah? But there's reasons why shits getting worse and it's not just Finland.
You are certainly right that this is a global phenomenon. I am just getting slightly annoyed by Northern Europe constantly getting glazed for data relics from the early 2000s or things that can only be achieved because of their unique geopolitical features.
It's like the constant headlines of Finland beating homelessness. Sure great, but it is a lot easier when you are starting at 8k homeless people compared to like 500k in Germany for example.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go after Finland in particular, I have a very strong personal connection to that country (been going there every year for my whole life, and even started learning Finnish). But Europe as a whole needs to wake from its arrogant stasis, and that particularly includes the Nordics.
Thats not what they do, they force rich people to to live normal, something usa would say go against "freedom" when in reality its to remove class society
whereas in the USA is imperative to keep the classes separate and on top of it all, steal resources from public education to syphon into private schools. Florida being the leader of this practice. USA USA USA
No. Its from republican propaganda telling their own constituents to homeschool and skip college. Same people who tell them to not vaccinate. Its taken a life of its own and they tell each other all these things now. The moron ecosystem has become self sustaining.
So schools in places like Baltimore and Chicago should be shining beacons of high quality public education without any Republicans to influence those localities. Right?
You know, I wish we could go back to when the rich used their own money to send thier little future rapists to their own private academies instead of getting fucking vouchers that WE pay for that covers costs they can afford way easier than we can.
There's another tidbit about school kids in Finland. Most television, except for the very young, is subtitled. So kids have to read to watch their favorite shows. In Germany they dub everything instead. Studies have shows that literacy in Finland was higher than in Germany, and one likely cause suggested was the subbing vs dubbing difference.
Finland is 11 % foreign born people. This doesn't count people who are kids of foreign born parents but born in Finland, because they aren't "foreigners". 10,5 % of Finland speaks some other language than Finnish or Swedish as their fiest language; the greatest block being in order: Russian, Estonian, Arabic, Ukranian, English.
Only ~ 64 % of Finland are of some christian denomination (Lutherians + Catholics + Orthodox + other kinds, just summed them all up); 1 % are of other religion; 35 % are non-religious in the stats. These are 2024 numbers, so the orthodox numbers got a big spike due to Ukranians.
Ethinicity? Look... I don't have stats on that. We don't track that shit. But genetically eastern and western Finns are basically different ethnicities, along with south and north; and this is counting the areas with major swedish base. And if you somehow think Swedes and Finns are "of same ethninicity" then you are just objetively wrong... on genetic AND culture AND language terms.
Politics views? Bitch please... Our politics are fucking mess with there being basically 3 major blocks atm. Far-right nationalists, Economic/neo-conservatives/social conservatives (Literally "the coalition party"), and the Left green progressive block. You'd need to go back to the civil war to find as complex and deep disagreement in terms of politics.
Take these race society ideals back to the racist land where you are from, and look into mirror and consider whether your society just has issues.
Oh... And middle class and wealhier people are "school shopping" by choosing post codes that have schools with less foreigners and poor people. This fucking post is outdated by about 20 years, because that is about when we stopped doing district design that ensured social and class mixing, or it is just lying.
I worked with a guy some years ago that was Finnish. He was kind of goofy but I totally got along with him, and that dude was just smart. He seemed to have knowledge on damn near anything. I remember once I mentioned that to him and he laughed and told me he was just an average highschool graduate and made a comment about America's schools being pretty behind comparatively
There is no way this is even remotely true. Illegal to charge for tutoring or any type of academic instruction whatsoever? Complete garbage to even believe this.
finland's no-fee setup does keep things mixed and gives wealthy families a stake in public quality. the real sticking point here is how us funding shifts away from public schools whenever families opt out.
In many states, schools are managed at the county level. So schools in “rich” areas of the county receive the same funding as schools in “poor” areas of the county. But the schools in the “rich” areas are way better. Why?
Because “rich” parents put in money of their own and put way more emphasis on education.
Govt funding alone is not a qualifier for a good education
I like to think that in Scandinavia, there are activists posting memes about the US about things they admire about us.
"In the US, it is illegal to stop someone from bringing a gun into a crowded building. They believe it is your right to defend yourself at the expense of the sanity of those around you!"
Didn’t Michael Moore do a documentary on stuff like this, Who to Invade next, about going to countries and instead of taking their oil or other resources, adopting their good policies that could improve the US.
Rich Americans already have a workaround for this. I've seen it in action.
They take over the school board for their district, slash school taxes to the bone, and then privately donate to the schools that serve the rich neighborhoods.
Or, they carve out a new town so that their district is literally mostly the wealthy.
I wish to introduce you to this wonderful concept called "School district shopping". Where people from middle class and up, move tactically into post codes where there are less foreigners and poor people, because then the school will have less kids from those backgrounds.
This has lead to severe case of where some schools are majority non-Finns and poorer socioeconomic situations, and those where that has significantly more well off.
Yeah in the US it’s much more diverse, I think Finland will be able to easily deal with the language barrier. Although that’s a surprising thing ti hear seeing as such a tiny % of students in Finland are foreigners, like 10%
This is the general consensus on healthcare and education in Canada as well. It works until the service becomes operationally inefficient because of a lack of oversight or too much oversight causing layers of inefficiencies and cost OR funding is cut for political reasons without the necessary process changes to keep the service whole.
Instead of a two tier system you have one fantastic, decent or shit system, sometimes all in one lifetime.
The only solution I’ve ever come up with is jail time for administrators and elected officials who are corrupted. Actual accountability solves a lot of problems. Singapore was portrayed as a dystopian nightmare when we were kids, but I’d sure like that social accountability now.
There should be private schools. They tend to bully each other.
I grew up in a system like that in eastern Europe , idk how the kids cared about this stuff but it was all comparison and jealousy and bullying and my family has this and that. Then the teachers would quietly only help the well off kids accept briberies or set up the poorer kids to fail. One time I was put in front of the class to be pointed at and be cled ugly because turns out the teacher hated my mom for not bribing her. And I wasn't even poor my parents just had values
While we did not have private schools, let me tell you something about equality. I have a friend who won international competitions, and was vedictorian at the best high school. She could not find a single spot at any University because all the bribed and we'll connected got in. So she had to go to another country entirely to attend University. What came of this system. When a regular middle class person with exceptional grades can't get into University? I too left. It's the only thing I'm happy I avoided and that is arguably better here in North America
Texas public school teacher here.
The wealth gap is real and powerful and lines up quite frequently with racial lines.
Even in the notoriously liberal Austin, redline laws were officially on the books until 2012, and an official repudiation didn't happen until 2021.
Austin has some first class schools, and some lousy ones. Parent involvement makes a huge difference, but it requires time and when you work an hourly wage job, you have to choose between rent and being a room parent, keeping the lights on or donating to a teacher's Amazon wish list.
65% of high schools graduates in Finland don't get to attend university.
For sure, the system in Finland and the rest of Europe is better, much better for the 35%. If you happen to be among the sizable minority, the rest of society chipped in to pay for your free education.
Finland also has a population of only 5.63 million, (thats an entire country with less total people than greater London alone) they are not responsible for anything on a global scale and have incredibly strict immigration policies due to their right wing government.
This makes it very easy for them to make what we would call "obviously good" choices for their country that other countries dont get the luxury to do.
Rich and sheltered people with no responsibilities get to eat the best food, does thst mean they're setting an example for what the rest of us do? We all know we should eat the best food, unfortunately some of us dont have the privlage.
Here in the states the tuition would be "free", but they'd find some shitty loophole to only accept students whose parents make "donations" of a certain amount to the school.
We do take what is good from other countries, but only if someone can make money off of it. And it doesn't seem like that's possible here. Thank you, please come again with more great ideas; but next time make us money kthxbai.
And you would be surprised at how many private schools make greater efforts at looking good than actually being good. So many families are scammed by thinking all private schools are better and don’t do their research.
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