The Best Universities in Europe: Finland
Jan 11th, 2009 by GCR Editor
Continuing our survey of universities in Europe, what can the Google-method of ranking tell us about universities in Finland? I know very little about Finnish higher education, so this will be an educational exercise.
As with other multilingual countries, we have a choice of searching in either English or the primary national language. English is widely used in academic circles in Finalnd, but we should certainly try both.
If we search google.fi for the English word university we get this top-ten list (after the usual filtering is applied):
- University of Helsinki
- University of Jyväskylä
- University of Kuopio
- University of Oulu
- Helsinki University of Technology
- University of Turku
- University of Vaasa
- University of Tampere
- University of Joensuu
- Tampere University of Technology
If instead we search on the (decidedly non-Indo-European) Finnish term yliopisto we get a somewhat different ranking:
- Helsingin yliopisto (University of Helsinki)
- Tampereen yliopisto (University of Tampere)
- Jyväskylän yliopisto (University of Jyväskylä)
- Kuopion yliopisto (University of Kuopio)
- Turun yliopisto (University of Turku)
- Joensuun yliopisto University of Joensuu)
- Avoimen yliopisto (Open University)
- Vaasan yliopisto (University of Vaasa)
- Tampereen teknillinen yliopisto (Tampere University of Technology)
- Lapin yliopisto (University of Lapland)
Most of these universities have detailed websites in both English and Finnish (and often in Swedish as well), and are clearly conscious of the world-wide character of the web (something many other institutions fail to recognize). They all look like wonderful places—I would like to visit every one!