Recommendations that places on over-subscribed university courses such as medicine, psychology and dentistry be allocated entirely by student selection rather than a lottery system have been rejected by universities, news agency ANP reports.

The university association VSNU says the idea, drawn up by a government committee, involves too much work and is unnecessary, ANP says. Student organisations say the move would mean too much emphasis on the results of school-leaving exams.
At the moment, most pupils leaving a VWO secondary school have an automatic university place. Some subjects, such as medicine, have a fixed number of places and allocate around half of them by lottery.
Education minister Ronald Plasterk said earlier that selection does not have any advantages over the current system.