Halving tuition fees has little effect
Halving tuition fees for new students this summer had little influence on whether or not to study. Most saw it as a nice financial windfall.
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Students enrolling for the first time at a college or university have paid only half of the statutory tuition fees since September in their first year of study. Students of teacher training courses also receive the discount in the second year.
Making amends
The measure was announced in the coalition agreement and can be seen as a compensation for the abolition of the basic grant in 2015. It would also make higher education more accessible, Minister Van Engelshoven hoped. Critics believed that it would be better for her to increase the supplementary grant.
The effect of the measure is still limited. This summer, research agency ResearchNed approached more than 11 students and MBO students who were faced with the choice to study on behalf of the ministry. 1285 of them completed the questionnaire.
In total, 6 percent of HAVO / VWO students and 17 percent of MBO students say that halving tuition fees played a role in the decision to study.
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In most cases, however, the measure was not decisive, but they see it as 'a nice financial windfall'. One of them says in the report: 'It's cool and all, but even without the halving, I would certainly have gone to college.'
It's cool and all, but even without the halving I would certainly have gone to college
According to the researchers, the halving seems to have a particularly positive effect on students with a migration background or MBO students whose parents are less well off financially. They are over-represented in the group who say the discount had some influence on their decision. Or, as the researchers carefully put it: the halving of tuition fees seems to 'certainly remove some of the financial doubts among this group of students.'
Nothing can be said with certainty about the effect on teacher training, because too few students in that target group had completed the questionnaire.
Equality of opportunity
The research is too small to draw firm conclusions, the researchers and the minister acknowledge. Van Engelshoven does call the effect on students with a migration background or with less well-off parents a “positive development”.
