Dutch universities are attracting increasing numbers of foreign students. This year the number of international first-years grew by 13 percent to 10,500. Of these, 4,800 are on a Bachelor’s degree programme and 5,600 are on a Master’s programme (100 are lost to the rounding down process).
Two thirds of the foreign students come from Europe and one third from other parts of the world. The number of Germans grew, but in proportion to the overall growth, according to the VSNU. Germans have made up about 30 percent of the foreign students in the Netherlands for years. At the same time, 10,400 former applied sciences students started a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree at university. This represents a drop of 8 percent, says the VSNU. That may be due to the high cost of transitional programmes and of taking a second degree, but the VSNU declines to speculate on that. The number of first-year Bachelor’s students with a VWO (academic high school) diploma rose by one percent to ‘almost’ 28,500. The VSNU has not yet added up the total and these figures are rounded off to the nearest hundred, but the overall impression is that the number of first-years has risen slightly by about one percent. There are about 244,000 students at Dutch universities.