Dutch fear brain drain as early career research grants axed

Dutch government plans to scrap grants for early career researchers have been met with dismay, with academics fearing young academics could be pushed out of the Netherlands in search of funding.

Cuts to research and university funding exceeding €1 billion (£840 million) were first announced in May by the new Dutch coalition government, the country’s most right-wing in decades. Earlier this month, new education and science minister Eppo Bruins announced that €215 million will no longer be cut from “sector plans” which fund positions for 1,200 academics.

Instead, “starter” grants for early career academics, as well as “incentive” grants for universities to distribute at will, will be scrapped entirely, while further cuts will be made to the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Universities Netherlands chair Caspar van den Berg said that the government was “shooting itself in the foot”, adding: “It is important that the sector plans remain intact, but exchanging one cut for another hardly reduces the total damage.”

Remco Breuker, professor of Korean studies at the University of Leiden and a former member of the now-disbanded advisory committee on the starter and incentive grant programme, told Times Higher Education that the cuts were “catastrophic”, commenting: “I don’t know how long it will take for Dutch academia to rebound, and some fields may never rebound – it’s that bad at the moment.”

The €300,000 starter grants, issued to newly appointed assistant professors, were intended to give early career academics more research time, with less pressure to teach full-time or compete for funding.

“Research is all important, and if you don’t have time to do it, it’s very hard to build a proper career,” Professor Breuker said. “For the humanities and social sciences, it means we’re back to teaching full-time. If you want to do research, you’ll have to do it in the evenings or the weekends.” Academics in STEM fields would find their time consumed by grant applications, he said.

Several of Professor Breuker’s colleagues who expected to receive starter grants have now had to “adjust their plans really drastically”, he said, in an effort to secure funding elsewhere.

Pointing to the government’s “internationalisation in balance” bill, which will restrict overseas student intakes, Professor Breuker said his faculty expected to lose 2,000 of 5,000 students should it be implemented as expected. With funding cut and students limited, he said, “I’m not sure whether we will survive as a faculty.”

Eddie Brummelman, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the Young Academy, said that losing starter grants will have “immediate and far-reaching consequences”, with innovation hampered by decreased early career research, increased competition for grants and reduced appeal to prospective academics.

“Talented researchers may decide to leave the Netherlands, causing a brain drain, while universities might fail to recruit talented researchers internationally,” he said.

Belinda van der Gaag, a spokesperson for NWO, the research council, said the new budget could be a “loss for the whole country”, as “it enlarges the chance that tomorrow’s talent will not be educated in the Netherlands”.

“It also stimulates the movement that young researchers decide to leave the research field in general,” Ms van der Gaag said. “This will have a huge impact on our capacity as a country to solve problems that are important for society.”

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com