In the 2021-2022 academic year, more international students will once again be registered at a university or higher professional education institution. This is evident from figures published by Statistics Netherlands on Friday. In total, about 115,000 students from abroad are following a course in the Netherlands, more than 11,000 more than in the previous year.
More than 80,000 international students are studying at a university this year and almost 35,000 thousand at a higher professional education institution. In the past, master’s degree programs were especially popular, but since 2017-2018 more and more students have come to the Netherlands for a bachelor’s degree. A quarter of all first-year students now do not come from the Netherlands, in scientific education this is even almost 40 percent.
The internationalization of higher education is a subject that is often discussed politically. Among other things, the anglicization of the curriculum and the consequences of growth for both the university and the housing crisis are on the agenda. In recent years, there has also been criticism of the active recruitment of international students by universities. They would have stopped doing this by now, a tour of the showed in August last year Financial Newspaper†
Numerus fixus
Universities can limit the intake by introducing a numerus fixus for popular study programmes, but this restriction also applies to Dutch students. According to European agreements, Dutch educational institutions may not specifically refuse foreign students if they come from the EU.
Institutions benefit financially from the arrival of international students. They must annually distribute a subsidy amount from the government on the basis of the number of students and the number of diplomas issued. Whoever has the most students will receive the largest share of the subsidy. As a result, it can happen that despite a growth in the number of students, a university is financially backwards because student numbers from other institutions are growing faster.
At the same time, companies in certain sectors benefit from the arrival of international students. After graduating, they can help to combat staff shortages on the labor market. In particular, students with a technical or physics background often succeed in finding a job in the Netherlands after their studies. In 2019, the Central Planning Bureau calculated that a European student who graduated in the Netherlands contributes an average of EUR 5,000 to EUR 17,000 to the Dutch economy throughout his life.