The reputation of Swedish universities will be seriously damaged if international students cannot get their residence permits considerably faster, said the Uppsala Nya Tidning today (in Swedish). This is the key message of a letter from Sweden’s universities to the Swedish government, continues the article, which also identifies Sweden’s embassies as struggling to process all the residence permit applications in time. An example of this was reported in Pakistan’s Daily Times, on November 3rd, which has a shocking article about 12 000 Pakistani students whose residence permits for Sweden have not been processed in time for the start of term, due to delays at the embassy.
(I’m having real difficulty in getting the link to the Pakistan’s Daily Time’s article to work, here’s the link to their homepage, and here’s the URL of the story, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\113\story_3-11-2008_pg7_27 , sorry about this!)
The article continues by pointing out that education will no longer be ‘free’ in Sweden (from 2010) and that this issue becomes even more critical as a result. The article concludes by saying that in the last year the number of applicants has effectively doubled; further growth could place greater pressure on a system which – for some students at least – does not perform at all well.
University Usability 