Finest Future specialized in recruiting international students to study in Finnish upper secondary schools and vocational institutions.
Chairman Peter Vesterbacka admitted the company is facing financial difficulties but says they’re not giving up yet. According to him, the main reason is that the Finnish government suddenly introduced tuition fees for non-EU students in upper secondary and vocational education. That change made it hard for the company to sell programs because they couldn’t determine prices in advance.
My guess? Once the free-education model disappeared, so did the potential customer base 😓
What’s a bit ironic though is that some Finns were “milking” their own free education and welfare system when it benefited them including building businesses around it and recruiting international students. But now that the policy changes, suddenly it’s framed like they’re the victims. Meanwhile Finns think that the foreign students are somehow the problem of their poor economy 😓
On LinkedIn it looks like all references to FF have already been quietly removed suggesting he hasn’t been connected to the company for months.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20214812
Posted by Severe_Turnover9411
7 Comments
A lot of speculation and your own theories included. Off course the issue was free-education model being halted as that was his product.
Also weird that you somehow managed make this post criticizing some/all Finns while FF was always Vesterbackas own hustle. And not like it was particularly loved one: https://yle.fi/a/74-20086449
[deleted]
Good riddance to this child trafficking BS.
not so fine now is it
1. How does one “quietly milk their own free education”?
2. I don’t know if anyone has formed really any broad opinions – on foreign *or* domestic students – based on Vestabacka’s weird-ass grift. It simply doesn’t nudge the needle one way or another, economically or otherwise.
3. We can have a conversation whether or not foreign students have a meaningful impact on the economy. My gut says not really, and the conversations about expenditure that small are dumb and needlessly full of semantic nitpicking.
Fafo
Finnish “free” education system does not belong to the whole world.
If you think otherwise, you can open your wallet first.