Heading south: Dutch students come to Flanders en masse
The cost of higher education has sharply increased in the Netherlands, so more and more Dutch students are coming to Flanders. But not all reasons are financial
Numerus clausus
Although registration fees have risen in Flanders since the start of the last academic year,the €890 students pay is still half of what’s required in Delft, Leiden, Utrecht or Amsterdam. Moreover, the Dutch government has recently scrapped the basic scholarship.
So a university and college “invasion” of our northern neighbours seems a logical consequence – considering the lack of language barrier and given that the quality of education between the Netherlands and Flanders is more or less the same.
Statistics indicate that there are indeed more and more Dutch students enrolling in Flanders’ institutions of higher education. Last year 4,224 students domiciled in the Netherlands were registered at a Flemish university or college. That’s about 1,000 more than three years ago.
A tsunami?
The steep rise puts the share of the Dutch in Flanders’ student population up to nearly 2%. But that Dutch legion isn’t spread evenly among the institutions. The closer to the border, the more popular a school is.
That’s why more than 7% of all the students at Antwerp University (UAntwerp) are Dutch, while the city’s AP University College has the largest Dutch cohort among Flemish university colleges (4%). Hasselt University and the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) are the runners-up.
So how are universities and university colleges, all strong supporters of more internationalisation, reacting to this ever-increasing inflow of the Dutch? “Not so long ago, we were a bit worried,” Peter De Meyer, an Antwerp University spokesperson, tells me. “We couldn’t really estimate how many extra Dutch students would come here. Would it result in a few percentages more, or would it be a tsunami?”
From what I heard from my friends, several aspects of student life are just better here
The latter would have caused problems, says De Meyer, like overcrowded auditoria and less interaction between students and their professors. “Fortunately, the increase we saw a year ago was manageable.”
If you had to mention one characteristic by which Flemish students differ from their Dutch counterparts, you could probably say that the latter speak up more, says De Meyer. “Somebody who asks a critical question can get a discussion going.”
At Ghent University, the number of Dutch students also increased significantly, but, according to spokesperson Stephanie Lenoir, this is also part of a broader picture. “We saw an increase from 2 to 2.5%, but the total number of non-Belgian students also increased, from 11.5 to 14%. The Dutch story is thus also – partly – an element of the success of our internationalisation efforts.”
Limited enrolment
Lenoir also emphasises another important reason why many Dutch students come to Flanders. “Several educational programmes in the Netherlands, like veterinary medicine, for example, are restricted by a so-called numerus clausus – only a limited number of students are allowed to enrol. So those who didn’t get into their programme of choice – and it’s more a lottery than an exam – come to Flanders.”
But for Lisa De Haardt, who enrolled in her bachelor in social and economic sciences at UAntwerp a decade ago, none of the above reasons applied. De Haardt grew up in Nijmegen, which has its own university, but crossed the border because she couldn’t find an equally interesting study programme in the Netherlands. “I just decided based on the programme,” she says. She went on to earn a master’s in public administration at KU Leuven and now lives in Antwerp.
“In my circle of friends back in the day, I was the only one who chose to come to Flanders,” De Haardt recalls. “But from what I heard from my friends, several aspects of student life are just better here. Finding a student apartment is much easier and cheaper, and the cities in Flanders or not so overcrowded as in the Netherlands.”
But her decision to leave her country wasn’t entirely inspired by the curriculum, De Haardt eventually reveals. “I also chose to study in Antwerp because it was just something out of the ordinary. It even seemed a bit exotic.”
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