Excellent foreign students should be incited to study in the Netherlands, and talented Dutch students should be motivated to take on a program abroad. Enter the new grant program, which awards five-thousand euro grants to selected students. Institutions are supposed to pay half of the expenses, and are in charge of selecting their students. Selection criteria will probably be announced in early 2015.

Minister Bussemaker also announced she wants to make ‘transnational education’ legally possible. It would allow students to follow a Dutch study program abroad entirely. Bussemaker announced her plans today in a vision letter about the international dimension of higher education and secondary vocational education (mbo).

In a press realease, the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences and the Netherlands Association of Universities (VSNU) have said they’re ‘delighted with the international ambitions’. ‘The government’s vision on internationalization stresses the importance of internationalization that was recently advocated by VSNU in their joint ‘Vision International’. VSNU also says: ‘We know from experience that a scholarship fund for excellent students is a prerequisite for boosting internationalization in higher education. Moreover, a scholarship program increases the international visibility and appeal of higher education and research in the Netherlands.’