The Eurostudent project collates comparable data on the circumstances of students across Europe. The surveys chart the living conditions and studies of students in higher education as well as their international mobility. The project started in the 1990s and surveys have been carried out roughly every three years.
The data were collected for the cross-European EUROSTUDENT IV study, forming the Finnish part of the survey. Main themes included the socio-economic background and living conditions of students, study progress, international mobility and expectations and plans for the future.
Questions covered reasons for choosing the programme (work, personal development) and expectations for getting a job after graduation. The survey also charted the respondents' gap years, and qualifications and employment background before enrolling in the current programme. Living conditions were studied with questions on housing, distance to institution, income and expenses, paid jobs during semester and the term and time use for different purposes. The respondents were asked whether their progress in studies had been as planned, and if slow, about factors influencing the progress.
International mobility was investigated by asking about study periods abroad and other issues related to study abroad (funding, expectations, reasons, obstacles).
Personal conditions were further studied by asking the respondents whether they had children and how many, and whether the was anything that hindered their studies. Some questions focused on family background, surveying the education level, employment status, occupational group and social standing of the parents.
Background variables included the respondent's age, gender, R's and parents' country of birth, number of times applied for the programme, year when first enrolled for the programme, whether full-time or part-time student, whether a student of distance education, field of study, major region (NUTS2), region (NUTS3), plans for studying after completing the current programme, language of the programme and R's language skills.
A sample of 8,400 persons was drawn from students who had the Finnish citizenship and were studying for a ISCED 5/5a level degree in one of the 50 higher education institutions in Finland during the academic year 2009-2010. Higher education institutions were asked to 1) sample every 26th (not the 1st) student from their registers put in a particular order (according to degree, degree programme or field of study code or the surname) and 2) send the contact information of persons in the resulting sample to Statistics Finland. Statistics Finland sent three reminders to non-respondents.