Around a quarter of foreign students who completed a university or college degree are still in the Netherlands five years after graduating, according to new figures from international education organisation Nuffic.

In total, 25.3% of students remained in the country, an increase of 1.2 percentage points compared with the previous study, which focused on graduates from 2006 to 2015. Students specialising in technical subjects, education and healthcare were most likely to stay, Nuffic said. In total, 80% had a job, up 6.1 percentage points.

Of those graduating in 2017, 40% were still in the Netherlands a year later, while 57% of students who completed their studies in 2022 were still in the country in 2023.

“The likelihood of staying has increased every year since 2018,” said researcher Ece Arat. “If this trend continues, the stay rate could rise to between 5% and 40% within five years.”

Some 30% of students with master’s degrees were still in the Netherlands five years on, compared with 25% of those with bachelor’s degrees.

“They have put down more roots in the Netherlands,” Arat said. “They have had more time to learn the language and build up a network.”

The previous government had made a point of encouraging foreign students to stay in the Netherlands to work, but the current right-wing administration wants to cut their number and make Dutch the main language of higher education again.

That focus is having an effect. The number of international students signing up for a degree course at a Dutch university or college went down sharply last year, according to figures from the Dutch university association.

The number of applications from outside the EER to study for a university bachelor’s degree are down 9%. Non-EER students pay sharply higher fees. The number of EU students, who pay the same as the Dutch, is down 6%.

Amsterdam

The Nuffic research shows that over one third of international graduates are working in the Amsterdam region, with the other four main urban regions accounting for between 7% and 10% of the total.

Almost half of students who studied at Eindhoven University or another institution in the region remained in the Netherlands, along with 39% of Delft graduates and 36% of those from Utrecht.

The stay rate among students from outside the EU and EER was nearly twice as high, at 39% compared with 20%. Non-EER students are allowed to stay in the Netherlands for an additional year after graduating to look for a job under the “search year” visa scheme.

Indian students

Students from Suriname were the most likely to remain in the Netherlands — almost four in five were still in the country five years after graduating, although the total number was relatively low. Iranian students — also low in number — were the second most likely to stay.

Nearly half of Indian nationals who graduated in the five years to 2018 were still in the Netherlands in 2023 — around 1,245 people. Greek and Chinese students also accounted for a large proportion of those remaining in the country.

There are  some 122,000 international students currently studying at a Dutch university, three and a half times as many as in the 2005 academic year and around 15% of the student body is not Dutch.