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A Swedish university was ordered by the country’s Supreme Court to refund tuition fees to an American student who dropped a program due to low-quality teaching, The Local reported. Connie Dickinson began a program in analytical finance at Mälardalen University in 2011, the same year Swedish universities introduced tuition fees for international students. She quit the three-year program midway through after an evaluation by the Swedish higher education authority conducted in 2013 judged the university's math instruction to be of “insufficient quality.”
The court ordered that Dickinson be refunded about two-thirds of the tuition she paid, and that the university pay her legal costs. Johannes Forssberg, a lawyer representing Dickinson, described the verdict as "a precedential ruling. It's now established that foreign students have rights in Sweden and that universities have to meet the requirements set by law when it comes to quality of education," Forssberg told The Local.
The Supreme Court ruling (in Swedish) is here. Mälardalen University has issued a statement on the ruling here. The university's statement says the mathematics program at issue in the case has since received a rating of "high quality" from Swedish higher education authorities, in 2015.
