International students feel unwelcome in Norway

It was autumn 2023 introduced tuition fees for students from countries outside the EU and EEA who want to come to Norway to study. The scheme was introduced at short notice and with insufficient information on amounts and how it would all be organised. The rates that were finally adopted varied from 130,000 to 500,000 per academic year, depending on the study program and level.

On the master’s program in global health at the University of Bergen (UiB), there were five international students who chose to accept the study place they were offered despite the fact that this costs them NOK 187,000 per year. The students who started say that they have saved for years to be able to study in Norway, and the sudden introduction of tuition fees meant that they also had to borrow money from family and friends to afford both the tuition fees and living costs.

To avoid that students come to Norway without having money to live here, everyone who applies to the UDI for a student visa needs to document that they have at least NOK 137,000 for their own residence in the first year. These funds must be placed in a Norwegian account. Since the students do not have the opportunity to create a Norwegian account until they receive a residence permit and a Norwegian identity number, it is common practice for this money to be transferred to the educational institution’s deposit account pending formalities.

At UiB it is student Samskipnaden Sammen, which administers the deposit account. The students’ funds for subsistence will not be transferred back to them until they have created their own Norwegian account. During the waiting period, students can be paid NOK 9,500 of their money on a krone card. The Krone card can be used as a means of payment in shops, but cannot be used to pay online. There is a theoretical possibility that the student can have their krone card topped up if necessary while they wait to have a Norwegian bank account set up, but information about this is difficult to access. This is probably due to the fact that it is cumbersome to administer the deposit money, and that there are few students who have reported a need for this.

The students don’t stay either routinely informed when they are offered a study place that the process of obtaining a Norwegian identity number may take time, or that they are not allowed to take on a part-time job during this waiting period.

At the master’s program in global health, we experienced this academic year that several of our paying students had to wait 4-6 months for a Norwegian identity number, and thus the entire first semester passed without them being able to open an account in a Norwegian bank and gain access to their own funds in the deposit account. They were thus in practice prevented from using the money they had set aside for their own stay in Norway.

Since they don’t either had the opportunity to work part-time like 2/3 of Norwegian students do to get by, they found themselves in a difficult financial situation. The students report that paying for housing became particularly difficult, even when they had rented a dormitory from the student association that administers the deposit money, because the invoices for the monthly rent must be paid online and not via the krone card. When the students tried to contact the UDI and the National Register of Citizens to find out why the proceedings took so long, they were given no guidance, only told that they did not have the right to appeal until 16 weeks had passed!

As a study environment, we are not involved in the process for the students to obtain a residence permit. Nor have we been involved in the scheme with deposit money and krone cards. It was only this spring that we became aware that several of our tuition-paying students unfortunately found the first semester in Norway to be very difficult because in practice they could not afford either food or housing, and they felt dependent on help and financial assistance from strangers.

More had to stay on a mattress on the floor of someone they had met randomly in various networks. This put them in a desperate and degrading situation. They experienced that the study situation they were presented with through websites and information from the university did not correspond to the daily study life they ended up with.

Having a student group from countries outside the EU/EEA in our study programs is very valuable as it provides an extra dimension in the exchange of knowledge between the students. Unfortunately, the slow processing of cases by the UDI has created an impression of Norway as an unpredictable and bureaucratic country that treats foreign students with little respect.

Students who pay high tuition fees to study in Norway should be able to expect that they receive good information about what study and life situation they can expect, and they should be able to expect good help and guidance from the place of study and national bodies. The experiences our students have had show that there was much that was missing when the tuition fee scheme was thrown at us and that should be cleared up before the next academic year.

The biggest problem is that UDI’s case processing seems to take a disproportionately long time, and that the guidance UDI gives to those who follow up their case is very deficient.
Similar problem has been discussed previously in Khrono.

Afterwards it has found that part of the problem for at least one of our students was a technical problem in the communication between the Police/UDI and the National Register of Citizens, and hopefully someone in these agencies will follow up on it.

The stories of these students also suggests that we as a study institution should establish routines to detect whether our students experience legal and practical problems at the start so that we can avoid more people ending up in such a degrading and stuck situation. We also believe that it is important that the universities also inform about the risk of slow case processing at the UDI when they send out letters of offer to the international students. Then those who do accept will know what awaits them when they arrive.

It is obvious that this is not very good advertising for Norway as a study country, but to not inform them of the financially stuck situation they will face in the first months is to mislead them.