Three quarters of all international students will leave if all bachelor programmes switch to Dutch, according to research by UG economists Ahmed Skali and Harry Garretsen. This would cost universities nearly 9 percent of their budget. UKrant talked to the researchers.
You started this research in March 2023, when the Rutte IV cabinet was still in office. Did you already foresee the shift towards more Dutch-taught education at that time?
Garretsen: ‘The debate around internationalisation was already happening under education minister Dijkgraaf when we started this research, so we did think that the political landscape was heading in this direction. And once we began, our work indeed became more relevant.’
You work at a university that will also be affected by the new internationalisation policy. Was it hard to keep your personal feelings out of this research?
Skali: ‘When it comes to this matter, all you hear are opinions, but we make policy based on evidence. So for us it was not so different from other research in the sense that we bring evidence to the table. For the experimental part of the research, we pre-registered our hypotheses and analysis plan in an online repository. So we really mitigated our biases.’
What have you discovered?
Garretsen: ‘We wanted to know about the demand for English education compared to alternatives: Dutch-taught education or English-taught courses at universities in Sweden and Belgium. We used a discrete choice experiment to estimate how much both Dutch and international respondents are willing to pay for English-taught programmes.
Dutch students generally weren’t willing to pay more for an English degree than a Dutch one. On the other hand, internationals are willing to pay more if the education remains in English, but they’re not willing to pay for a Dutch-taught degree, except for a few students from Germany or Belgium who can more easily master the language.
That means the university sector will shrink. If we switch to Dutch, we lose at least three quarters of the international students, which leads to a budget loss of about 8.6 percent.’
You claim that the number of researchers and lecturers will decline proportionally with the budget, by 8.6 percent, but that the scientific output will drop by 19 percent. Why is the difference so large?
Skali: ‘You really have to ask: who is going to leave? If you are one of the less productive researchers, you can try to leave, but won’t necessarily succeed. Those who do leave are usually the more productive people who have better options.’
Garretsen: ‘We have quite a high percentage of non-Dutch speakers at our universities, which makes us vulnerable. And for Dutch staff it may not be so easy to take over these tasks.’
You say that master programmes taught in English will suffer from the decision to teach bachelor programmes in Dutch. Why is that?
Skali: ‘In our calculation model we are a bit conservative and assume that these master programmes do not suffer. But as a concept, that’s hard to imagine. Internationals that come to Groningen for an English bachelor are likely to stay for their master. But if this bachelor is now in Dutch, they may not come to Groningen at all.’
Furthermore, the switch to Dutch also sends the message that we are a less open society, and people interpret these signals.’
Garretsen: ‘Also, countries around us will react. They are already investing more in English-taught programmes. So even if the government changes its mind, the playing field has already changed. Other European countries might have a better reputation than we do.’