Productization of Education

Abstract

In 2015, Finnish government has amended the law concerning higher education in Finland, seriously effecting international degree programmes and institutions organizing them. Since the fall term 2017, all students with citizenship based outside of the European Union countries or the European Economic Area are obliged to pay tuition fees for studying any higher education programme in Finland. This modification caused decline in number of foreign applicants and universities are forced to take actions in order to be able to mitigate the impact and consequences of the legislative change.

This study focuses on analyzing the current situation of international programmes at Finnish higher educational institutions and exploring possible ways of improving their competitiveness through service productization. Recently, service productization has been gaining increased attention since it has the potential to improve business results as well as competitiveness. By transforming solely intangible services into more product-like sets of deliverables, which are standardized enough to be repeatable and easily comprehendible by the customers, results can be improved while costs, time needed and afford spent decrease.

The theory describing productization of education is very limited. This study assumes existing connections between service productization and the success of international programmes. It proposes a unique approach of implementing extensive service productization which results in increased performance. By productizing, universities could regain the number of applicants back and even exceed it in the future.

To be able to confirm these assumptions and obtain necessary data, an in-depth single-case qualitative study was conducted. As a case company, Centria University of Applied Sciences was selected and four principals of its four international programmes were interviewed. Semi-structured interviews were the chosen technique for data collection.