Education Inspectorate: there are enough reasons to teach in English

Many politicians believe that too many foreign students are coming to the Netherlands, so Bachelor's programmes should adjust their language of instruction to reduce that number. In their view, the language of instruction should only be English if the programme has good reasons for it. Programmes will soon be subjected to a test to verify whether or not their choice of language is justified. 

To be allowed to continue teaching in English, degree programmes must meet certain criteria, including relevance to the labour market or an inherent "international character". The test will also take into account if the programme in question is offered in a region suffering from a population decline.

The Minister of Education asked the Education Inspectorate what the reasons are for offering courses in English and what students and teachers think about switching to Dutch.

In-depth interviews
The inspectors conducted extensive research and in-depth interviews at five Bachelor's programmes offered in Groningen, Leiden, Tilburg, Wageningen and the University of Amsterdam. The inspectorate is keeping a low profile regarding the new internationalisation bill (and the accompanying language test), but the report says a lot.

All five programmes give more or less the same reasons for teaching in English, and the inspectorate believes these reasons sound well-considered and careful. For instance, the programmes say that the labour market is internationally oriented or that international students are needed because of shortages in the labour market. "In addition, education and research are strongly intertwined," the inspectorate concludes. "International researchers provide a significant portion of higher education."

Chain reaction
The five programmes are not keen on switching to Dutch. They fear a chain reaction in which they will lose staff and students, while the workload for the remaining teachers would increase and the quality of education would deteriorate.

The students don't need to be taught in Dutch. The Dutch students among them do not expect to have any problems in the labour market because they have enough knowledge of the Dutch language.

Labour market
What's more, from professional literature to jargon, English is often the language of science. Many internationally oriented companies in the Netherlands also adopt English as the language of the office. Furthermore, an English-taught Bachelor's degree would make the transition to an English-taught Master's degree easier.

Furthermore, foreign students and Dutch students could learn a lot from each other – intercultural skills, for example. The programmes think it is beneficial to students to be exposed to different perspectives and cultures in an international classroom. An international group of teachers is also needed for such a course.

Dutch as an academic language
At the same time, the universities say they want to promote Dutch as an academic language, which is why they offer courses for international students interested in learning Dutch. Some of those charge a fee, some don't. International teachers are also encouraged to learn Dutch, although they can continue to teach in English. The big question now is: would these programmes survive the test? The inspectorate has not said anything about that.

They can't say anything anyway because another supervisory body, the Higher Education Effectiveness Committee, will be conducting the test. Its chair was uneasy about the cuts to the higher education and research budget, so much so that he even considered resigning.

After a deal with opposition parties – in which measures to reduce the number of foreign students have been mitigated – the Minister of Education, Eppo Bruins, promised to amend the Internationalisation in Balance bill, giving special treatment to programmes in shrinking regions and surrounding areas. How this will work out in practice remains to be seen.

The five programmes examined are Biomedical Engineering (Groningen), Data science & Artificial Intelligence (Leiden), Econometrics and Operational Research (partly bilingual, Tilburg), Marine Sciences (Wageningen) and Social Geography & Planning (English-taught and bilingual variants, University of Amsterdam).