The bill that aims to curb the internationalization of Dutch higher education must be better developed. The Education Council stated this in an advice on Tuesday. Outgoing Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (Education, D66) had asked the council for advice after he had received a lot of criticism from (mainly) universities on his ‘internationalization in balance’ bill.
The council questions the feasibility of a certain test that Dijkgraaf proposes. He wants to determine whether a bachelor’s program may be taught in a language other than Dutch. The test is also the part that universities are most critical of, because it would interfere too heavily with their autonomy. According to the Education Council, the test lacks “clear, defined and weighted criteria” and therefore undermines the “principle of legal certainty”. Moreover, the council believes that the intended objectives of the test are disproportionate to the administrative burden. He advises institutions to provide “explicit, substantive and transparent” accountability for the chosen training language through existing, but strengthened, accountability and assessment mechanisms.
The council has a positive opinion about the proposal to expand the options for introducing a numerus fixus, so that the influx of international students for certain studies can be limited. But he thinks this requires more, namely measures for the financing system of higher education. Now it is the case that educational institutions receive more government money if they attract more students. This would lead to the perverse incentive to recruit as many international students as possible.
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The council is also positive about the extension of the obligation to promote students’ Dutch language skills. Only he believes that not only international students, but also international teachers and researchers, should master Dutch at a sufficient level within the foreseeable future.
The Better Education Netherlands Foundation (BON) – which has been providing solutions to improve education since 2006 – expresses its concerns about the advice of the education council in a response. “If this advice is followed, the introduction of the law will be even further delayed, because more research needs to be done, while the problems are very urgent.”
Furthermore, BON also believes that the aforementioned test should be removed from the proposal, but for a different reason than the Education Council: “The government then decides that an English-language bachelor’s program is in principle not an efficient use of government money, and can therefore never qualify for government funding.” According to BON, the Education Council wrongly assumes that the educational institution can choose the language of instruction itself and that it is a matter of better accountability. But that choice lies with politicians, says BON.
With the law, Dijkgraaf wants to combat both the high influx of international students and the Anglicization of higher education. Both mainly play at universities. In the 2022-2023 academic year, more than a third of first-year students at Dutch universities came from abroad, according to CBS figures. This causes a growing shortage of student rooms, overcrowded lecture halls, high workload for teachers, the threat of displacement of Dutch students in certain studies and of Dutch as the language of education.
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