Increased demand for Lifelong learning courses

"The number of applicants has increased, we have more applicants for these courses than many universities have in total. We have received almost 44,000 applicants without having done any advertising. It's still possible because KTH has such a fantastic reputation," says Anders Johansson, who is responsible for Lifelong learning  at KTH. 

The number of registered participants doubled from 6,385 in 2023 to 12,885 in 2024. The figures do not apply to unique individuals, as some participants take several courses.

The number of applications also increased, from 27,146 in 2023 to 43,756 in 2024.

Many female participants

The most popular course in 2024 was ‘Procrastination and perfectionism’, with 871 participants. The largest course was ‘Learn to learn with AI’, with 1,098 participants, and the second largest was ‘Psychology and critical thinking’, with 890 students. A large proportion of the course participants were women.

"In total, 58 per cent of course participants were women. We know that women are much more likely to take personal responsibility for their attractiveness in the labour market, and this seems to have always been the case. Female-dominated industries dominate when it comes to purchasing contract training and women are more likely to engage in their own learning, formally and informally,’" Johansson says.

Why do you think the number of applicants has increased?

"Firstly, we have worked organically and allowed teachers to learn what works, for example we have talked about the attractiveness of short courses. It should be possible to study these alongside work and combine them with family and full-time work. Another movement, which we cannot influence, is that the realisation and awareness that we have an attractive range now seems to exist among professional engineers, architects and teachers in the country," Johansson says.

Text: Sabina Fabrizi