ABSTRACT
Utilizing official statistics, this chapter studies how the quantitative development of university administration is related to a governance model and the availability of funding. The study focuses on the quantitative development at the University of Helsinki and Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in the 2010s, since they constitute extreme cases that put common assumptions about the growth of administration to the test. Thus, this is not a comparative study of the Swedish and Finnish university systems; for that, the selection of universities would be totally inadequate. While Helsinki is a typical Finnish university, in many ways the archetypical institution upon which all other Finnish universities have been modelled, SSE is in several important respects an outlier within the Swedish system.
The highest governing body of these universities is the board. Finnish universities have a collegial governance model where faculty elect the majority of the members of the university board. Faculty majority is considered to be necessary in order to fulfil the national constitution's guarantees for university autonomy. In Sweden, the government elects the board majority at most universities, and it is up to the boards to decide whether to incorporate collegial bodies at lower levels in the organization. However, SSE is an exception where the board is elected by business interests. Private businesses also provide the majority of its funding, which increased steeply in the 2010s. Other Swedish universities have in the last decades been well funded by the government, while their Finnish counterparts have laid off staff because of cutbacks in government spending. Thus, this study analyses two universities that have strong autonomy – typical in the Finnish cases and unusual in the Swedish. Another common denominator is that they are both high-quality institutions, with a good reputation and high ranking in their respective segments of higher education. However, they differ in their exclusivity, financing and their ultimate sovereign, that is, the group that elects their university boards. While SSE is an exclusive elite institution that has not expanded the student intake to its core program for half a century, Helsinki is a mass university with over 30,000 students. While SSE has access to ample and expanding private funding, Helsinki is dependent on a shrinking government budget. While SSE is ultimately controlled by the national economic elite, many of them SSE alumni, the power over the University of Helsinki rests in the hands of faculty.
