German students less likely to come to the Netherlands

Almost 25,000 Germans were studying in the Netherlands in 2020, but this year, there are only 20,000 of them, according to Statistics Netherlands. While the total number of international students has increased, the number of Germans has gone down.

In 2011, Germans made up 46 percent of foreign students in the Netherlands. Now, they form just fifteen percent of the people studying at research universities and universities of applied sciences. Meanwhile, the number of Italians, Romanians and Spaniards is now eight to nine times higher than in 2011. China is in fifth place on the list of countries of origin.

The number of Hungarians and Portuguese is also rising rapidly. In 2011, there were three to four hundred students from these two nationalities in the Netherlands, and now there are nine times as many: 2,900 Portuguese and 3,340 Hungarians. The number of Irish has increased eleven-fold in the same period from 180 to 2,040.

HOP. Source: CBS. Nationalities with more than 1,500 students in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands has also welcomed an increasing number of students from the rest of the world, although the numbers are small per country. There are 29,300 students from countries outside the European Union, almost 20,000 more than in 2011. Almost 1,500 students come from Vietnam, 1,200 come from Iran, and 1,100 come from the United Kingdom. 

Of the 131,000 international students in the Netherlands, 92,610 are enrolled in research universities, which means they form 27 percent of the total number of students. The remaining 38,560 study at universities of applied sciences, forming 8.6 percent of the student body at that level.