Budget TUs to rise immediately

Secretary Ingrid van Engelshoven of Education largely embraces the recommendations made by the Commissie Van Rijn, tasked with reviewing the Dutch higher education funding system. This means a gradual budget increase for technical universities (TUs), starting this year.

For 2019, Van Engelshoven secured 27 million euros of one-time-only additional funding for the TUs. Next year, the same amount will become available by partly basing higher education funding on the number of STEM students enrolled at a university. This amount will increase to 66 million in 2022 per year onwards. In return, Van Engelshoven demands that all universities, but the TUs in particular, decrease the number of dropouts – though not through selecting students, as Van Rijn proposed.

Other major policy changes include reducing per-student funding, so as to dampen the incentive to attract as many students as possible, and reallocating 60 rising to 100 million euros per year from NWO’s budget to universities.