Metropolia UAS IT Programme changes after 31.7.2024

[BritStudent]

"Somewhat unrelated, but possibly still of interest: You cannot enroll in XAMK Open University courses without a Finnish Social Security number"

This was mentioned by homeschoolmom1 in this thread, has been a frequent theme in recent threads about Finnish studies - I'd love for it to be wrong though and I'll try and investigate further.

Xamk and Metropolia are different schools. To my knowledge, Metropolia still allows EU citizens to enrol for Open UAS courses. Though it looks like they don't explicitly mention that anymore on the website.

Metropolia changed their policy last year to only allow students with Finnish personal number to enrol at their Open UAS, but later they revised this policy, exempting European Union citizens from this requirement.

This section of the website lists Finnish social security number as a requirement for enrolment in Open UAS studies: https://www.metropolia.fi/en/academics/open-university

Ah yes, I was with Metropolia last year and at the end of the year they did start emailing me to ask for a Finnish ID number.

Hopefully I'll have my EU citizenship restored in a few months time.

Thanks for the clarification.

[cro-magnon]

For those who care to: you can apply for Finnish ID at an embassy if you say you want to move to Finland and apply for a visa. You don't have to go ahead with the application, but you need the number to apply so it's an easy way to get one.

Thanks, that's good to know. I might actually look into requesting an ID number through their embassy, since I'm considering applying for a degree programme there in the future anyway.

Part of the reason for the restriction is because of the need to prove your identity. Finnish social numbers have e-verification. But so do a lot of other EU countries, and a lot of Finnish OUAS offer to let you verify with another EU country's e-verification. For example, I can use my German Ausweiß (ID Card) to login at several OUAS.

I was vaguely aware you can use some EU national e-verification services when confirming identity with Finnish government through the e-Suomi portal.
But the My Studyinfo login page on Studyinfo.fi/Opintopolku.fi explicitly says 'Identification methods for foreigners in Suomi.fi e-Identification are not currently supported.'
I assumed this applied to the entire Finnish higher education system, but from what you're saying that is not the case when enrolling in courses directly at the institutions. Or maybe it's just a misleading bit of text they forgot to remove from the website, who knows. I'll need to see if can login with my digital gov ID from Poland.

On a different note, I noticed Swedish higher education, similarly, introduced slightly more stringent student identity verification starting this autumn term.
I had to request codes via snail mail to activate my student accounts. We'll see if they even arrive, lol.