Reducing the number of international students would harm the Dutch economy

What would happen if the universities of Rotterdam, Leiden, Utrecht and Amsterdam lost seventy-five per cent of their international students? And what if the same happened at the Master's level? What if international talent were to cease coming to the Netherlands for work?

The five universities in the Randstad region (Utrecht University, Erasmus University, Leiden University, VU Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam) commissioned the economic research agency SEO to calculate the impact of such a significant reduction in the number of international students. As it turns out, this would cost the Dutch economy roughly four to five billion euros, out of a total of over a thousand billion.

Elections
The Dutch will go to the polls on Wednesday, October 29. Eight political parties say in their election manifestos that they want higher education institutions to prioritise Dutch-taught courses, which would reduce the influx of students from abroad.

This is not the first time they have made such a proposal. The association of Dutch universities commissioned a similar study from SEO some time ago, when they were still concerned about a bill titled "Internationalisation in Balance," which stipulated that many English-taught programmes would have to switch back to Dutch. However, in May, the dreaded “language test” that existing Bachelor's programmes would have to submit to disappeared from the bill.

The universities then asked SEO to calculate a 75 per cent decline for Bachelor's programmes and a 10 to 30 per cent decline at the Master's level. This is, therefore, a speculative scenario which is not based on any existing measures. The influx of international students has already declined somewhat in recent years. The figures for this year are not yet known.