A Boost for Universities?
photo © 2008 Tulane Public Relations | more info (via: Wylio)Interesting news out of the Dutch department of higher education, not entirely relevant to what I have been writing about in the past couple of weeks but maybe signaling a change of sorts in the way the Netherlands is treating education as a whole: Halbe Zijlstra, the state secretary of higher education, spoke of a “triangle of research, education, and entrepreneurship” that he sees at the foundation of all future plans when he announced a new program to address absenteeism, procrastination and a tendency among Dutch students to take much too long to finish their undergraduate degrees – or not finish at all. Zijlstra announced tuition hikes for students taking longer than four years to finish a bachelor, longer than three years for master’s students, from the now common 1700 Euros per year to almost 5000 Euros. Nonetheless, the plan will end up costing the government money, an estimated 310 Million Euros a year according to the New York Times, because plans include vast improvements in the advising sector. Incoming students can now expect a better infrastructure to prepare them for university.
I am sort of ambivalent about the plans. Lets not forget that Zijlstra is the same guy who helped cut the cultural budget by 20 percent in late June and he is part of the same government that aims to balance the budget by cutting social programs across the board while sparing banks, home owners and the like. The majority of the Dutch people stood behind these cuts though and quite frankly I tend to agree that something needed to be done to boost the quality of universities…
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on Saturday, July 16th, 2011 at 10:16 am and is filed under Dutch Education, News.
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