Last year, just under 262,000 students registered for a bachelor’s or master’s degree at Dutch-language colleges and universities or for higher vocational education. The number of registrations increased slightly by four percent compared to the 2019-2020 academic year. This is evident from figures from Statistics Flanders on Tuesday. It appears that fewer and fewer students are succeeding in obtaining their bachelor’s degree within the set study duration and therefore need some extra time.
At five percent, the growth at the universities of applied sciences was slightly higher than the three percent growth recorded by the universities. In general, however, more and more students have opted for higher education in recent years.
Since 2019-2020, the universities of applied sciences also offer graduate courses of higher professional education. This has undoubtedly played a role in the rising numbers, as has the reforms within teacher education. In the same year, this was reduced to teacher training at three different levels of education, namely a graduate degree, three bachelor’s degree programs and two master’s degree programmes.
The universities of applied sciences accounted for 54 percent of the enrollments in 2020-2021, the universities 46 percent. Up to and including the 2012-2013 academic year, the share of university colleges was still at 60 percent, but this gradually decreased when the university colleges transferred most academic bachelor’s and master’s programs to the universities the following year.
Longer study duration
Of the students who started a bachelor’s degree program in the 2018-2019 academic year, 30 percent obtained their bachelor’s degree within the scheduled study time. In the 2008-2009 academic year, that share was still 36 percent. Between 2008-2009 and 2018-2019, the total number of students starting a bachelor’s degree did increase from 49,709 to 50,994.
The study duration for an initial bachelor’s program with a study load of 180 credits is three years. But about 20 percent of students need an additional year to graduate. Another ten percent need an extra two years. The group that needs three or more additional years is small.
Figures from Statistics Flanders also show that slightly less than 73,100 diplomas in higher education were awarded in Dutch-language institutions in the academic year 2020-2021. There was a slight increase in professional bachelors, academic masters, higher vocational education and doctors. However, slightly fewer students obtained an academic bachelor’s degree compared to the previous academic year.
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