Foreign students increase at Dutch universities; concerns about teaching in English

The proportion of foreign students in Dutch higher education is growing, according to internationalisation organisation Nuffic.

This study year, it reports, 11.5% of students at Dutch colleges and universities are from abroad, compared with 10.5% last year.

These 85,955 young people are from 170 other countries, and there has been a particular increase in those from Italy and China. About a quarter come from Germany.

There has also been a growth in people from outside Europe, who get no government money and fund their own degrees, and now this group makes up almost 27% of the total numbers.

But not everybody is happy with the development, which involves more and more subjects being taught in English. A group of professors, writers and journalists, has written to parliament to ask for changes in the law for a ‘more sensible balance’ of Dutch and English in higher education and to protect the Dutch language.