Higher Education in Sweden - 2014 status report (Swedish HE Agency, Report 2014:10)

Every year the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ) publishes a comprehensive overview of higher education in Sweden in the form of an annual status report based mainly on the extensive statistics provided by the higher educational institutions and Statistics Sweden.

The Swedish Higher Education Authority is responsible for official statistics on higher education. One of the things the organisation measures is gender equality. The annual report includes comprehensive gender statistics.

Summary of the Annual report

In terms of the numbers it employs higher education is the largest public sector undertaking in Sweden.  Overall expenditure in this area amounted to just over SEK 60 billion, which means that the higher education sector accounts for just under two per cent of Sweden´s GDP.

Two trends characterise developments in higher education in recent years. One is that it is becoming more international with an increasing degree of global recruitment, a trend that has been discernible for several years in admissions to both first and second-cycle courses and programmes as well as third-cycle studies. Almost every fourth new student in Sweden (24 per cent) was an incoming HE entrant in the academic year 2012/13.

The second trend is the increasingly important role played by research in higher education. For many years Swedish HEIs have experienced a period of expansion with rising revenues, but it is mainly funding for research at the HEIs that has increased while there have been major variations in the number of places offered in courses and programmes. During the last ten years revenues for research and third-cycle courses and programmes have risen by SEK 7 billion in fixed prices, which corresponds to 24 per cent. The development in recent years towards fewer HE entrants and an increasing focus on research has continued during 2013 – but at a considerably slower pace.