The University of Amsterdam wants to limit the influx of foreign students for the popular psychology and political science studies from next academic year. The university wants a trial with a quota for international students who register for the English-language variant of those studies. This is one of the first measures that, according to board chairman Geert ten Dam, is “desperately necessary” to give Dutch students more opportunity to follow these studies.
Also read: Universities no longer want to grow
It’s not official yet. Universities don’t have hard tools to ban international students – they aren’t allowed to select by nationality. Hence this experiment, with which 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’. Moreover, the UvA cannot wait for years. “The workload is too high, the numbers are too great,” says Ten Dam.
Two thirds of psychology students at the UvA now come from abroad. “We are reaching the point that Dutch students from Hoorn, Emmen or Amsterdam-West cannot go to popular studies because they are being outcompeted by students from abroad,” says Ten Dam.
She points to the growth of all universities over the past five years, and in particular the increase in the number of ‘internationals’. The UvA, for example, grew from 31,000 to 41,000 students in five years; the number of Dutch students grew by 6 percent, the number of foreign students tripled to approximately 13,000. In twenty years, the number of university students doubled from 170,000 to 340,000. The number of new foreign students grew from 6,500 in 2015 to 18,000 last year. More than 20,000 foreign students will probably start this year.
More universities want to slow down the growth in the number of international students. According to the umbrella organization Universities of the Netherlands, twenty study programs would set a quota for foreign students, if that were allowed. These courses include psychology, political science, 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. , and study programs at the University of Twente.
Waiting for legislation
Pieter Duisenberg, chairman of the umbrella organization: “Since 2018, we have been asking for legislation that makes it possible to introduce a numerus fixus for English-taught bachelors, while keeping the Dutch-language variant accessible. Can not. We also want programs to be able to say, for example: a maximum of fifty students from outside Europe. Also not allowed.”
A bill that would make this possible was postponed this year by Minister Dijkgraaf. “When those instruments come in, we’ll introduce them immediately,” says Duisenberg.
From a tour of NRC among all universities it appears that the vast majority no longer want to grow. The growth of the past twenty years has not been accompanied by extra money. Only this year, almost 1 billion euros has been set aside for additional staff and space.
The growth is also caused by more and more Dutch students opting for university – with the additional effect that many universities of applied sciences are shrinking. This leads to overcrowded lecture halls and a high workload for lecturers. There is also no accommodation: earlier this month, several universities already called on international students not to come to the Netherlands if they do not have a room.