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.