The UvA emphasizes that this is a trial. It’s not official yet. Universities don’t have hard tools to ban international students – they aren’t allowed to select by nationality.
With the experiment, the UvA wants to anticipate political decision-making and help education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (D66) to “explore whether a maximum number of foreign students leads to greater accessibility for Dutch students”.
According to board chairman Geert ten Dam, these kinds of measures are “desperately necessary” to give Dutch students more opportunities to follow these studies. Moreover, the UvA cannot wait for years. ,,The workload is too high, the numbers are too large”, according to Ten Dam in NRC.
There are more universities that would like to limit the number of international students. According to the umbrella organization Universities of the Netherlands, no fewer than twenty study programs would set a quota if that were possible. In addition to psychology and political science, these courses also include media studies, future planet studies and communication at the UvA, psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science at the VU University in Amsterdam, psychology at Maastricht University, some studies such as aerospace engineering at TU Delft. Delft, and programs at the University of Twente.
