Education Council: ‘Back to drawing board for internationalisation law’

We need to wait for a recommendation by the Education Council, said outgoing Minister Dijkgraaf last January, when critical members of the House of Representatives told him to get a move on with limiting the intake of foreign students.

For two years now, Dijkgraaf has been working on his bill ‘Internationalisering in Balans’ (Internationalisation in Equilibrium), a collection of measures intended to protect the Dutch language within higher education and make it possible to curb intake into English-taught tracks of degree programmes. He wanted to hear the vision of the Education Council in this matter.

Substantiation

So now there’s a new recommendation, which comes down to this: think things over more carefully, because the consequences haven’t been properly investigated and the substantiation isn’t up to scratch. Also, other opportunities exist to reach the goals.

There’s actually only one thing in the bill that the Education Council truly approves of: limited enrolment for tracks taught in English (or other languages). This may be beneficial to Dutch students’ access to education, the Council believes.

The VVD party is also in favour of this and even submitted an amendment last month to already enshrine the measures relating to limited enrolment in law. Dijkgraaf didn’t want to do this yet. It needs to be done in conjunction with the rest, he believed, and he hasn’t submitted his bill yet.

The recommendation to take more time to think things over is bound to meet with scepticism in the House of Representatives. “The accuracy of legislation shouldn’t be affected by time pressure”, says chair of the Education Council Edith Hooge.

Politicians have been working on such a law for years. Can the cabinet already introduce some of it and take longer to think about the rest?

“We give advice and highlight the risks of this bill, but we don’t say anything about the pace at which the minister must proceed. We leave that to politics.”

At the same time, your recommendation says some things are in danger of going too fast. For example, outgoing minister Dijkgraaf wants to test the current English-taught programmes to see whether they’ve chosen the right language of instruction. If not, they have to switch to Dutch quickly.

“And that’s something we consider disproportionate. It would result in a lot of uncertainty, as no clear conditions are in place yet for programmes to deviate from Dutch as the language of instruction.”

Can’t the programmes start substantiating their choice of language already? This would give them more than nine months to work with.

“According to the bill, the institutions have to engage in self-direction, which they could start doing already. We also think they should do a better job justifying the language they teach in. But at the end of the day, this bill would give the outgoing minister the authority to grant or withhold permission for non-Dutch-taught education. That creates uncertainty, making nine months really far too short. Imagine doing something like this to a tech programme where half the teachers are from abroad. A quick switch to Dutch-taught education isn’t feasible in such a case. It also leads to legal uncertainty.”

The Council suggests different funding for Dutch-taught and English-taught programmes.

“You could, indeed, look into whether that’s a way to make the intake of international students manageable.”