He attended middle school in Risør while his elder brother managed the farm after their father's early death and took the examen artium in Kristiania in 1899.

In 1907 Birkeland helped Vegard to get a government stipend to study conduction of electricity in gases at the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

[6] British universities weren't awarding PhD degrees at the time, so in 1910 Vegard returned to Oslo and resumed the aurora research under Birkeland.

In 1911 he managed to get another scholarship and go to the University of Würzburg to study anode rays, which were relevant to his hypothesis about positive ions in aurora, under Wilhelm Wien for another year.

In Germany Vegard also heard Max von Laue's lecture proposing X-ray crystallography, appreciated it and wrote Bragg a detailed letter about the idea.

During World War I the Norwegian, unlike his colleagues in continental Western Europe, was not bothered by any military work and was able to communicate with both German and British physicists, publishing his X-ray crystal lattice analyses (for example, of silver, gold, lead and zircon) both in Philosophical Magazine and in Physikalische Zeitschrift.