Enrolment figures are falling in higher professional education. The total number of students has fallen by eight per cent over the past three years. As a result, the number of teaching staff has fallen by 5 per cent since 2022, and support staff by 3 per cent. Those on temporary contracts have been particularly affected.
Around 21,000 former students with student loan debts are living at unknown addresses abroad. The student finance body DUO is unable to contact them and is missing out on €170 million. The government wants to make it easier for DUO to track down such individuals. A draft bill (in Dutch) on this matter has been published
The Shinyhunters hacker group has returned the stolen data of over 275 million Canvas users to Instructure. It is not known whether the ransom demanded was paid. The hackers had stolen, among other things, usernames, email addresses and messages from Canvas, an educational application used by around 9,000 institutions worldwide. The US-based company Instructure, the
The Dutch universities believe they should be less reliant on the American software giants. So, they are setting up a joint committee to promote greater digital autonomy.
Once again, a graduate of a university of applied sciences (hbo) has lost a court case regarding the basic grant (and supplementary grant) for a university master’s degree. ‘Those are simply the rules,’ the judge ruled, adding that only politicians can change them. It remains a curious situation: after a bachelor’s degree at a university
The European Research Council (ERC) wanted to reduce the workload of reviewers by introducing stricter rules for grant applications. Following strong criticism, those plans have now largely been dropped.
A major fire at a data centre in Almere has caused disruptions at Utrecht University. Students and staff are unable to log in to the institution’s websites and applications. The university magazine DUB is also offline. The fire broke out Thursday morning in a data centre in Almere, which also houses servers belonging to Utrecht
The Dutch Student Union (LSVb) is calling attention to the money worries of Iranian students. Many are unable to access their bank accounts due to the war in their home country, while their ability to work in the Netherlands is limited.
Data from 275 million users of the Canvas learning platform worldwide is believed to have been stolen in a cyberattack. The hackers are threatening to publish some of the data if the software’s developer does not pay a ransom.
