What happened when the eligibility requirements were raised was that the proportion of women applying and being accepted dropped sharply. Men clearly benefited from the new requirement, the Swedish Council for Higher Education (UHR) summarized earlier this autumn.
The reason seems to be that men took to the new system more than women. Now the university has ended up going back to how it was before.
"We have been working for a long time with different types of initiatives to increase diversity. And so it turned out like this, we went in a completely different direction," says principal Lars Strannegård.
Happiness rating
The prestigious Swedish School of Economics tightened its admission requirements in an attempt to weed out potential applicants with happy grades. Handels, led by Lars Strannegård, simply wanted to address reports of how some upper secondary schools give their students unjustifiably high grades.
"We have never seen happiness grades as a problem among the students who come to us, because they are super talented. But you get the feeling that you can't actually trust the grades," says Lars Strannegård.
Handels therefore required that applicants, in addition to high school grades, have a university entrance exam score of at least 1.25 points in order to compete for study places. This level is reached by about a fifth of all test takers in the country.
The result was that fewer people passed the eligibility threshold, especially among women. Of those who were ultimately accepted, 29 percent were women – a sharp decrease compared to the 39 percent in the previous years.
We were genuinely surprised by the magnitude of the change.
Refusing the test
He says that although men perform slightly better on the university entrance exam than women, it was not decisive.
– It ends up that women with high grades do not take the university entrance exam to the same extent as men do. One can speculate on what this is due to, but we can only state that this is the case.
The School of Economics is now looking internationally for other possible selection methods, where grades are combined with tests, for example. Lars Strannegård also has some hope for a new grading system. Earlier this year, the government's investigators proposed a system with national final exams where the results are weighed into the final grades, precisely to curb grade inflation.
I hope it will be that way, says Lars Strannegård.
Eligibility requirements for the two bachelor's programs Bachelor of Science Program in Business and Economics and Bachelor of Science Program in Retail Management at Stockholm School of Economics 2025:
Basic and special qualifications in the form of high school grades.
At least 1.25 points on the Swedish Higher Education Entrance Examination (HP). This requirement will disappear next year.
Result:
The number of eligible applicants in the national admissions round decreased from 2,231 people in 2024 to 1,249 this year. The biggest loss was among women.
The proportion of men admitted increased from 61 percent (2022–2024) to 71 percent this year.
Sources: UHR and School of Economics
