Imagine being a student from abroad who chooses to study in the Netherlands because you’re promised ‘an international experience’. Having to do an internship here as part of your studies, however, you’re told: ‘Sorry, you need to speak Dutch.’
This is currently the case with two of the students in my class. Students get to choose between museums, science centres, newspapers, TV and radio stations, and so on. The problem is that some students – the ‘internationals’ – do not get to choose. The reason? They do not speak Dutch. And so, some of them find themselves having to fly back to their country of origin to do their internship.
International students currently represent about 12 percent of all students in the Netherlands, a percentage that has doubled over the past ten years and has contributed to internationalisation efforts and the economy in ways not many people would have imagined at the outset.
At the same time, the minister of Education states that he wants to ‘prevent an excessive influx of internationals’, and considers taking a series of measures to cut down on the number of admissions of international students.
My brain hurts as I’m trying to understand when a human being passes a certain imaginary mark and becomes ‘excessive’. Is it when their presence is no longer necessary to justify marketing the Dutch higher education as international, or is it when their contribution to the economy is no longer needed?
Does a human being become ‘excessive’ when their presence is no longer necessary to justify marketing the Dutch higher education as international?
There’s no doubt that the internationalisation of higher education in a globalised world benefits the Dutch too. Dutch students get the opportunity to learn about other cultures, other curriculums, and other perspectives. About other ways of being in the world. Dutch academics extend their networks and collaborations, acquire funding and eventually contribute to the country excelling in the global knowledge economy.
Still, international students are often seen as a threat (or, at best, an inconvenience) instead of an asset, and are faced with closed doors when looking for a house, an internship, or a job.
When a country that, for so many years, has carefully cultivated the image of a liberal, open, and tolerant society suddenly shifts towards the re-nationalisation of higher education, I can only think of this shift as a side effect of a larger trend: nationalism, which is, to put it mildly, suicidal for a country claiming a top place in those – largely pointless – global higher education rankings.
International students do not come to the Netherlands for the weather, the tulips, or the windmills. They come to the Netherlands because they’re promised to study in an international environment, which goes far beyond the language of instruction. It includes opportunities to interact with society at large.
The fact that international students struggle to land an internship (or find a house, or a job) as part of their study programmes is both unfair and paradoxical. If local organisations, including universities, understood how much they actually benefit from diversity, they would invest even further in internationalisation, instead of resisting the influx of humans.
It seems that, despite various proclamations to the opposite, we’re still miles away from making this happen.
LUCY AVRAAMIDOU