Dutch Education Council criticizes plan to put the brakes on international students

The Dutch Education Council said on Tuesday that it is critical about some policy measures that the government wants to implement to limit the number of foreign students in the Netherlands. The advisory group mainly questioned whether rules about lectures in languages ​​other than Dutch are even feasible.

The Ministry of Education announced the measures in April. The ministry said that it wants Dutch to remain the primary language of instruction at universities and colleges. The position that could soon be implemented would mandate that no more than one-third of courses be given in another language. Usually, English is chosen when the language used in an academic program is not Dutch. An institution would only be allowed to exceed that limit with permission from the minister.

This limit would also apply to training courses that are already being given, which have already been reviewed and approved. The additional measure will place an enormous “administrative burden” on the institutions, the Education Council said.

Moreover, institutions only have nine months to develop and submit their proposals. This is too short a period of time, the Council said, and the rules that institutions must comply with are also unclear. If a program is not allowed to deliver lectures in another language, this will have “major organizational and personnel consequences” for the applied sciences universities and academic universities, according to the Education Council.

Another possible measure is missing from the proposal, the Council continued. It is now financially attractive for courses to recruit as many foreign students as possible, as institutions then receive more money from the government. This causes institutions to compete with each other. The Education Council advised the government to now think about other ways to distribute the money, “to make the influx of international students manageable.” The ministry only wants to consider this at a later date.

The Education Council is optimistic about the possibility of setting a maximum number of international students for some courses. Institutions sometimes have too few teachers, lecture halls, laboratories, and libraries to guide them. Moreover, there are too few student rooms for them in the cities. “For some courses, the demand for training places may increase so much due to the influx of international students (in a short period of time) that it exceeds the capacity of the course,” the council said. It said that universities also support such limits.

The Council of State will also issue an opinion on the proposal later. It is then up to the Cabinet to adjust the plans if necessary and submit them to the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament.

The Dutch Education Council has existed for over a hundred years, and provides policy and legislative advice to successive Cabinets, ministries and parliaments. The autonomous and independent Council is made of 12 members appointed by royal decree based on their expertise, according to the organization’s website. “The Council performs its tasks on the basis of an annual work programme determined by the Minister of Education, Culture and Science.”