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‘Fake’ universities operating in Sweden

The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education (Högskoleverket) has issued a warning about two so-called fake universities operating in Sweden. Both universities offer courses up to and including doctoral level.

Published: 10 March 2009 09:56 CET
'Fake' universities operating in Sweden

One of the universities, the Scandinavian University of Science and Technology (SUST), is only accessible via the internet, and has a post office box registered to an address in Angered, a suburb of Gothenburg, according to local newspaper Göteborgs Posten.

The university’s homepage was out of service on Tuesday morning.

The second university, calling itself the Alhuraa University in Sweden, is based in the Stockholm region and claims to be a branch of a university of the same name in the Netherlands.

The university markets its courses primarily at Iraqis living in Sweden and its homepage is primarily in Kurdish and Arabic with a short presentation in English.

Both universities offer academic degrees up to doctoral level and neither are registered academic establishments in Sweden, the National Agency for Higher Education has warned.

The agency has called on the government to investigate whether these two “universities” are operating in breach of Swedish law.

“If they are not, then we have a real problem, because we could then see many more in the future,” said the agency’s Erik Johansson to Göteborgs-Posten.

The internet is littered with fake universities offering academic qualifications but remain relatively unusual in Sweden.

EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Published: 18 April 2024 16:09 CEST
Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

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