It seems like ages ago, but only a few months have passed. There were action groups, lobbyists, protest marches and petitions. Once the dust of the crisis settles, all the discussions will automatically resume, but things might perhaps be a little bit different than they were before the coronavirus.

Work pressure

Staff members at universities in particular sounded the alarm about work pressure. Protest movement WOinActie demanded more than one billion euros in additional funding for higher education, and when the money was not forthcoming, the protesters gathered at the opening of the new academic year and called for the minister to step down. The protest movement turned to the labor inspectorate and threatened to organize a strike.

This discussion has completely subsided for the time being. Everyone is working hard to keep education and research up and running in times of corona. Naturally, that can’t last forever, but all timetables and task divisions have been thrown out. It’s not even clear yet what education will look like in the coming year, and making plans at this point about reducing work pressure seems even more untimely. And that extra money? Now that the government has to spend so much to soften the crisis, those one billion euros seem further away than ever before.

Free science

Funding of science was another much-debated issue. An important committee called for ‘restoration’ of the balance: free research and thematic research should receive equal funding, the committee said. And reduce the role of research funding body NWO, because applying for funding is too time consuming.

Those procedures do indeed take a long time, because the NWO wants to award the scarce grants as carefully as possible, but perhaps the corona crisis might lead to a breakthrough. It suddenly proved possible to distribute funds for corona research in record time.

Effect of student loan system

The basic grant was abolished in 2015, and that has consequences: studying has become thousands of euros more expensive. But what effects does that have on society: has it led to a decline in the number of people who enrolled in a study program, for example?

The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science or StatisticsNetherlands (CBS), for example, publish new figures and reports each year. Every party cherry-picks the facts that are in line with their position. Supporters of the student loan system see no problems at all, some warn that middle income earners will be hit hard, while others point out the consequences for secondary vocational education students or students with a physical disability.

The crisis will perhaps not change these positions, but they will become more clearly delineated: future graduates will enter the job market in times of crisis with high student loan debts. Some will work in the health care sector for a limited salary and risk their lives in the fight against a pandemic: thank you very much, would you quickly pay off your debt please?

Quality of education

The hundreds of millions of euros that became available after the introduction of the new loan system were meant to improve the quality of education at applied sciences and research universities. That proved to be rather difficult: many plans failed to meet the initial approval requirements of quality assurance agency NVAO.

The ministry was supposed to distribute the resources in the coming year based on these plans (the so-called ‘quality agreements’). The corona crisis has led to a postponement of one year. No one knows what education will look like in the future. We won’t be seeing crowded lecture halls any time soon.

Funding of higher education

The minister wants to protect small programs such as Dutch Studies and reduce competition between educational institutions. She also wants to keep higher education in shrinking regions running.

To achieve this, she intends to reform the way higher education is funded: the money will become less dependent on student numbers. But it still takes some finetuning. It seemed to turn into one of the major discussions, but for now, the following probably applies: no major changes for the time being. We will talk again in the fall.

Internationalization and anglicization

More and more foreign students managed to find the Netherlands. Programs gladly switched to English in order to attract international students, but not everyone was happy about that: protect the Dutch language, critics implored the minister. And what will happen to the quality of programs when no one is proficient in English?

A rather loosely formulated law is now in place that needs to curtail the use of the English language at universities (and certain universities of applied sciences), but the technical universities of Twente and Eindhoven were undisturbed and switched to English anyway.

It’s likely that fewer internationals will come our way, but this dip will probably be temporary. The discussion lies waiting and will reach boiling point again once people won’t be hearing the word corona every day.

#MeToo

People are paying more attention to transgressive behavior, discrimination and social safety in higher education since the #MeToo movement took on momentum. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to file a complaint, and you don’t break a superior’s rule of terror or an imbalance of power that easily. It’s a discussion that keeps reemerging. That won’t be any different now that everyone is working from home and needs to keep a distance of 1.5 meters.

National Student Survey

What do students think of their program? Each year, thousands of students share their opinions of their teachers, their study program, the facilities and more. It always used to be a sensitive issue, because you could use the results to deduce which programs performed mediocre and which ones excelled.

But since the introduction of the new privacy legislation and a few software blunders, resistance against the National Student Survey has grown. The universities of applied sciences didn’t take part for one year. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen, because the results are meant to properly inform prospective students and to improve the quality of study programs. The minister immediately drafted a legislative proposal that makes participation in the National Student Survey mandatory. But in the midst of the corona crisis, the educational institutions wanted to cancel the survey. Supposedly, the survey results would be incomparable with those of previous years, it was argued. This way, higher education passed up the chance to hear from their own students how it actually went, that major transition to online education.