What does the new government mean for your education?

Lijst Calimero eagerly awaited the new coalition agreement to discover the plans for higher education and their impact on our university in Groningen. Below, we give a brief overview of the most important measures that the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Democrats 66 (D66) and the Christian Union (ChristenUnie) are proposing.

Finance

A lot of money is being moved around, but in the end hardly any extra money will be invested in higher education. Besides more financial room for technical universities, there are almost no surprises in the finance section of the agreement.

The Study Advance Means have been saved during the negotiations. This means that the money that students had to give up after the abolishment of the student grants system, will indeed be invested in education. Therefore, the money will benefit all students. Discussions are underway on how the money will be spent. A further, so called Quality Agreement (“kwaliteitsafspraken”) will deal with this later on.

The student grants aren’t coming back, but new first year students will get a 50 percent discount on their tuition fee. This discount is for one year only, but students that follow primary teacher training get it for two years. This way, the government hopes to persuade more students to become a teacher. But don’t cheer yet: students will pay for this discount themselves. The interest on the student loans will almost certainly increase over the years, which means that students will later pay back more than that they get as a discount now.

Internationalization

The internationalization of our education system gets more attention from the new coalition. They want to give Dutch students more chances to study abroad, while making the Dutch education as appealing as possible for international students.

They also want to safeguard access to education for Dutch students. There will be stricter supervision on programmes taught in English. A programme can only be offered in English if the language has added value for the programme, the quality of the programme is ensured and there are enough comparable programmes on offer in Dutch.

Selection

Selection procedures will be restrained for bachelor as well as master programmes. First, the rules for instituting a student quotum (“numerus fixus”) for bachelor programmes will get stricter. Programmes will need to give proper argumentation for instituting such a limitation. Otherwise, the Education minister can decide to invalidate the quotum.

Second, master selection will be tweaked. The selection criteria will need to be fairer and more transparent. Furthermore, any graduated bachelor student should be able to follow at least one master programme in the own field of study. This plan will be developed further together with universities, student organisations like ISO and the Ministry of Education.

All in all, a lot of ambitions for the new education policy. As always, the devil is in the details. We will therefore keep an close eye on the national developments together with ISO and keep you informed about the consequences for you and our university.