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The bad housing situation in the city of Utrecht is oneimportant reason why prospective university undergraduates avoidUtrecht as their place of study. School-leavers who do chooseUtrecht University do so mainly because of the wide selection ofcourse programs and because they are motivated by the informationthe university provides about these programs. This is theconclusion of the survey 'Which University in 1999?'. A total of3000 students in the final two years of pre-university educationwere asked about their intended choice of university.

German graduates' pay.

If you want to make real money as a graduate in Germany you haveto study medicine, dentistry or law. Subjects such as German, arthistory or biology pay much less well by comparison. The Germanmagazine Focus investigated the financial rewards associated withacademic degrees in Germany. The survey itself is not unlike thatcarried out by Elsevier for the Netherlands every year. Thedifference is that Elsevier only looks at graduates' (net)salaries, whereas the German researchers also take the total costof studying into account. By going to university undergraduatesinitially forfeit a great deal of income. Instead of getting aqualification, they could have found themselves a job. And thatmeans on average a six years' loss of income. However, for moststudies it is still the case that getting a degree pays.

Digital higher education.

The Open University seeks support from other universities.Together with them this only institution in the Netherlands fordistance learning in higher education proposes to organize anational program of digital higher education. The plan is expressedin a letter by the Executive Board of the Open University to LoekHermans, the Minister for Education. A spokesperson for the OpenUniversity said that four universities had already expressed theirsupport for the plan. Last autumn the minister had asked for astrategy plan from the Open University, announcing at the same timethat the institution had to cut its costs by fifteen millionguilders.