Overseas student caps in limbo after Dutch government collapses

The collapse of the Dutch government over a migration row threatens further delays to a long-awaited law allowing universities to cap their intakes of non-European or English-language students.

“My first thought was this is not good for the country,” Pieter Duisenberg, the president of Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), an umbrella body, told Times Higher Education, reflecting on the fatal cabinet rift. His second thought was for the legislation to control international student numbers, which UNL has been lobbying for since 2018.

The latest version of the law would allow universities to cap the number of students a programme takes from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and the intakes to English-taught programmes, and to create an emergency brake that could pause all enrolments on a given programme.

Like the debate that broke up prime minister Mark Rutte’s cabinet, the campaign to control international student intakes is driven in part by pressure on housing in the Netherlands’ major cities. It was last week’s proposal by Mr Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) to restrict immigrant families’ right to reunite that blew up the coalition.

“A lot of the delay is because of polarisation,” said Mr Duisenberg, who was a VVD member of parliament before leaving to lead UNL, adding that simplistic politics around immigration had slowed the passage of the student controls, while acknowledging that education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf had withdrawn an earlier version of them because of concerns that they focused on language alone.

On 12 September, parliament’s education committee will decide whether the law on internationalisation is too controversial to be advanced by Mr Rutte’s now-caretaker administration. If that happens, it might not come into force until at least autumn 2025, Mr Duisenberg said, leaving universities to deal with international demand alone.

Institutions can put an overall cap on programmes, but not without excluding domestic students, who must be treated the same way as those from elsewhere in the EU under the bloc’s law. Some universities have experimented with running Dutch and English-language versions of degrees and applying caps only to the English track, while others already limit non-EEA places. But by doing so without waiting for the new law, this could expose them to lawsuits based on applicant claims of nationality-linked discrimination.

“It might be that it doesn’t hold if some of the international students bring it to court,” said Barend van de Meulen, director of the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, referring to the non-EEA caps, but adding that some universities might “gamble that none of them will do that”.

Joris Melkert teaches on the fully English-taught bachelor’s in aerospace engineering at the Delft University of Technology, which has long been popular with students from China, India and elsewhere in the EU.

Delft’s master’s aerospace engineering course is among those trialling an “experimental” cap on non-EEA students, but even this does not guarantee places for domestic students – Mr Melkert said the number of applicants to the programme from the Netherlands was “more or less constant”, while those from elsewhere in the EU were “ever increasing”.

Mr Duisenberg said he expected more universities would trial non-EEA student caps if politicians were to pause the law in September, although he would prefer that the education committee were to take the unusual step of passing only parts of the law, dropping a separate requirement for central government approval of English-taught programmes, but keeping the three control measures.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com