Holland remains a popular study destination
19 Nov 2010
There are 76,750 international students who study in Holland. Thus, Holland remains a popular study destination.
Additionally, Holland appears to be extra popular among female students. In fact, almost 60% of foreign students in government-funded education are female. A total of around 47,000 international students are enrolled in Dutch government-funding higher education, two-thirds of whom come from other EU countries.
Within Europe, Germany is the biggest supplier, with 20,800 students; outside Europe, China ranks first with 3,700. Three-quarters of all international students in the Netherlands are enrolled in bachelor’s programmes. These are the main conclusions presented in Mapping Mobility 2010: International Mobility in Dutch Higher Education, the publication that is now being issued annually by Nuffic – the Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education.
Dutch students abroad
In the 2006/2007 academic year, nearly 15,000 Dutch students were earning degrees in higher education abroad. This represents an increase relative to 2004/2005. The greater flexibility that students have had in applying grants and loans to study abroad (as from 2007) is not yet reflected in these figures.
In 2006/2007, approximately 27,000 students in Dutch higher education completed an internship or part of their studies in another country. Of these, 5,700 received an EU grant to do so. Topping the list of destinations were the United Kingdom and Belgium. Almost 90% of all these students stayed in Europe.
Popular study programmes and institutions
Within the Netherlands, academic degree programmes in Agriculture and professional degree programmes in Language & Culture welcomed the highest percentages of international students. On balance, the largest group of foreign students (17,500) came to the Netherlands to study an Economics discipline.
Coming in at second and third at research universities were programmes in Behaviour & Society and Engineering, with 5,100 and 3,000 students, respectively, and at universities of applied sciences in Language & Culture and Behaviour & Society, with 4,150 and 2,900 students, respectively.
The art academies can claim the most international student bodies, with the highest percentages of foreign students. In terms of the diversity of students’ countries of origin, TU Delft ranks first.
Rise and decline
The percentage of Dutch graduates in academic higher education who spent time studying abroad has been declining for a number of years now, even as this percentage in higher professional education has begun to rise. At the time of the most recent measurement, amongst graduates in 2007/2008, that percentage was 23%.
More information
The publication Mapping Mobility 2010 is available to download free of charge from www.nuffic.nl/mobility.