Dutch universities have come up with their own plan to reduce the amount of English used in lessons and cut foreign student numbers, which they hope will head off government legislation.

The government has drawn up proposals to reduce the “internationalisation” of Dutch higher education, including a requirement that degree courses considered to be Dutch should be taught for two-thirds in that language.

The universities argue the TAO test to determine what should constitute a “Dutch” degree course is unworkable and too time-consuming, and have therefore presented their own package of measures.

The TAO test is “too restrictive and threatens to disrupt the diversity of academic programmes while undermining the educational, research, and labour market benefits that internationalisation provides,” said Caspar van den Berg, chairman of the Dutch university association UNL.

In addition, the decision to introduce the TAO checks “has already created uncertainty among current and prospective staff and students, deterring international talent that the Netherlands urgently needs,” he said.

From next year, the universities want to cut the number of international students coming to the Netherlands by more than 2,000. In the peak 2022/23 academic year, some 19,000 foreign students enrolled in a degree course. Since then, numbers have fallen with applications to the VU university in Amsterdam down by 23%.

Psychology degrees, which are extremely popular in the big cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, will be taught in Dutch only in the Randstad region.

A fixed number of places will be introduced for other popular English-language programmes, such as economics and business administration. Universities themselves will decide how many students to admit.

This, the universities say, “allows universities to grow in programmes that educate students for sectors with labour market shortages”.

Dutch skills

In addition, the universities have pledged to take steps to improve the language skills of both students and staff, offering non-Dutch speakers courses which, they hope, “will encourage more international graduates to remain in the Netherlands to live and work after completing their studies”.

International education body Nuffic said in January this year that around a quarter of foreign students who complete a university or college degree are still in the Netherlands five years after graduating.

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.