Discord over planned cuts to international student numbers

Protests by higher education stakeholders are set to continue after the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science Eppo Bruins presented a policy to the House of Representatives that will limit the number of undergraduate international students coming to study in the Netherlands by one-third and save the government €293 million (US$317 million).

Demonstrations are being organised by WOinActie, a national movement of university staff and students formed to protect the interests of university education and scientific research, the Dutch Student Union (LSVb) and Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), among others. The next protest is planned for 14 November in Utrecht.

Reacting to Bruins’ plan for “Managing international student flows” presented on 15 October, Caspar van den Berg, UNL president, said that the Dick Schoof government’s “Internationalisation in Balance” bill was a “blunt axe”.

“This approach will impoverish education, we will lose important scientific talent and we will also scare off international students, who we really need in our country,” said Van den Berg.

English courses

Among Bruins’ plans is a reduction in the use of English at Dutch universities and colleges so that no more than one-third of the classes in most bachelor degree programmes will be in languages other than Dutch and a special committee will approve all bachelor degree courses which are English only.

Currently, one in three bachelor courses in the Netherlands is offered in other languages and half of these are a mixture of Dutch and English.

Universities will be asked to apply a cap on the number of students in all non-Dutch degree courses. If the caps do not have the desired outcome, universities will be given less funding per student, Bruins said.

The far right-led government’s measures are likely to most directly affect European students who currently pay the same tuition as Dutch students (around €2,500 or US$2,695 a year). The Dutch government subsidises each student by about €8,700. This means that having fewer European students means less government spending.

Higher long-term costs

Questioning the logic of the proposed measures on his blog page, Erik Boels, director of finance at the University of Amsterdam, said the cuts would produce more costs for the taxpayer in the longer term.

“The Schoof cabinet wants to cut €293 million in international education. But in the long term, the costs for the taxpayer are higher than the revenues. And the knowledge economy is taking a hit.

“More Dutch, less international: that is the common thread of the Schoof cabinet. This is also reflected in the vision on international study. The number of students from abroad must therefore decrease by around 33,000 each year. That is no less than one third of the total number of international students studying at a Dutch university or college,” Boels wrote.

“However, with fewer international students, not only do the costs decrease, but also the benefits. For example, it quickly costs the taxpayer more than what the cutbacks yield and the knowledge economy is hit hard: every euro of cutbacks now costs €3.50 in the long term.

“Every EU student less is a cutback of approximately €9,000 in education costs for the government. According to CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, these education costs now yield almost 3.5 times as much for the treasury. Every euro of cutbacks in the short term therefore costs €3.50 in tax revenue in the long term,” Boels wrote.

Boels said cutting back on international students would quickly lead to new problems – “and not only in euros that can already be predicted. The possibility of attracting talent will become smaller, which will result in limited competitiveness of our business community. Ultimately, this will weaken the economic position and innovative power of the Netherlands”.

Policy U-turn

Former secretary general of Universities Netherlands and president of the board of the University of Groningen Jouke de Vries also called the government’s policy on higher education “short-sighted” in his speech at the opening of the university year.

“Rarely have I seen such a U-turn in policy as the recent policy change in higher education. It must be a disappointment for former minister [Robbert] Dijkgraaf that his achievement – a billion-euro investment in higher education to make up for lost ground – was immediately revoked in the framework coalition agreement negotiated by the Schoof cabinet,” he said.

Vinod Subramaniam, president of University of Twente (UT) told the university’s independent newspaper U-Today the cuts announced on Budget Day were “unprecedented” in scale and the effects were likely to be “catastrophic”.

“I’m worried. Very worried. You can see that the government is pushing through the announced cuts. Only the funding for the sector plans has not been affected. But one way or another, the cutbacks are coming our way,” he noted.

Subramaniam said he was worried about the “contradiction” inherent in the cuts.

“On the one hand, it is said that there is a need for international cooperation, innovation and strengthening of the economy. But, as my colleague Robert-Jan Smits of Eindhoven University of Technology says: the only raw material for our economy is knowledge. It is precisely in this area that we are falling short.

“The Draghi report [addressing European competitiveness and the future of the European Union authored by Mario Draghi] recently proved this. We are nowhere near the target of spending 3% of our gross domestic product on research and innovation.

“The planning agencies also expressed their concerns, which are important signals that apparently nothing is being done about it. The effect of these cuts is disastrous,” Subramaniam said.

The value of protests

Both academics and students see protest as one of the few options available to them to express this concern.

Dr Julia Hermann, an assistant professor at the University of Twente, told University World News the protests were needed because the announced budget cuts would lead to a “drastic decline in the quality of research and education at Dutch universities”.

She said by organising a large-scale protest, “we show the government and our fellow citizens that the announced budget cuts undermine science and education and pose a threat to our country’s position in the world. The University of Twente will join the protests whole-heartedly”.

President of LSVb Abdelkader Karbache told University World News: “It’s getting tougher and tougher for students to afford their education. We already have students dropping out because of financial worries. That is completely unacceptable!

“That’s why we will be protesting tomorrow, the coming months and the coming years, till the government finally listens to students instead of creating more problems for them,” Karbache said.

Lessons from Denmark

Hans de Wit, professor emeritus and distinguished fellow at the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College in the United States, said cuts targeting international students were only one part of overall budget cuts to higher education, which challenged the competitive position of Dutch higher education.

He said seeing international student recruitment as fuelling an immigration problem and anti-Dutch culture was short sighted and not sustainable.

“In that respect, as the Danish example already has shown, it will be reversed in the near future. But not before damage is already done, and it will take time to recover,” he said.

Professor Jo Ritzen, a former education minister in three Dutch governments, a former adviser to World Bank president Jim Wolfenson and former president of Maastricht University from 2003-11, said the Netherlands was “an early mover in promoting economic growth through higher education and research, and through the influx of foreign students”.

He said studies show that some 20% to 30% of economic growth in the Netherlands can be attributed to foreign students who find their way into the Dutch labour market.

“The present Government (and a majority in Parliament) wants to reverse this and aims to cut down on the number of foreign students and on research spending,” he said, which would “put the Netherlands as an open economy without natural resources at a comparative disadvantage in Europe and would in the longer run undercut its ability to provide ‘livelihood security’ for many in its society”.

‘Livelihood security’ is a Dutch term implying the chance to live in decent housing and to be able to pay the bills.

He said the government’s approach to language in higher education “goes against the trends in the labour market, where increasingly graduates notice that at least once a day they will have to communicate with someone in another language”.

By contrast, the Government believes that there are too many foreign students studying in the English language in the Netherlands, he said. “They resent the internationalisation: Dutch students should be able to study in Dutch and foreign students should learn Dutch if they want to study in the Netherlands,” he noted.

He pointed out that “Dutch literature has been alive and kicking in the past 20 years when English language teaching became part of the Dutch education system and is in no way under pressure. The internationalisation of students may have – in its own small way – contributed to highly needed cross cultural international understanding.”

Universities have also experienced an “upward quality impulse” with the influx of foreign students and foreign staff: all Dutch research universities now belong to the top 150 in the world, he said.

Echoing De Wit’s reflections on Denmark, Ritzen said Denmark decided some five years ago to limit its influx of foreign students and required the universities to teach in Danish (with exception).

“Last year it turned around completely. Let’s hope that the Netherlands’ parliament has a long-run perspective in mind when discussing the proposals to limit the influx of foreign students. Yes: there are short run costs, but the long run social and economic benefits by far outweigh these costs,” he noted.

Ritzen acknowledged that aside from the language issue there are practical reasons for limiting the number of international students such as shortages of housing, which is a problem across Europe.

He suggested that perhaps the issue of receiving countries in the EU paying for the incoming student from another EU country could be alleviated in part by the provision of funding from a European source for European degree students studying in another European country.

“In my view the Draghi proposals for a more competitive Europe should incorporate the student mobility angle,” he said.