With the elections still fresh in memory and a new cabinet in the House of Representatives, critical pieces about the basic grant, interest on student debt, the housing market and the cursed BSA are flying at me online from all directions.

A barrage of statistics and anecdotes is meant to prove that today’s student leads a harder and less privileged life than the student of twenty years ago. Although those arguments sound logical, questions still arise in my mind now that I am observing it all from a distance.

When I stayed in the US for research, I paid 1,350 dollars for a month in a room I shared with three others, my second home had no kitchen, and some housemates at my third address depended on extra funding for food.

Here in China, students sometimes live with thousands in a single building, share rooms with four to eight students, and can be found in educational buildings 24/7. It raises the question: what are we making such a fuss about in the Netherlands?

Of course, in absolute numbers, student life may have been somewhat more comfortable in the past, but the current reality is still far from poor. You do not have to share a room and can borrow at an interest rate that is often lower than inflation. Add to that the flexibility of side jobs, and it almost seems as if a student, with a little goodwill, can enjoy a decent quality of life. What we in the Netherlands are truly kings at, however, is putting that goodwill into other things.

A fellow exchange student in Beijing, who is an international student in Groningen herself, joked that Dutch students put more energy into complaining about a failing grade than into preparing for the exam. Our “six culture” and the noncommittal nature of lectures, which we prefer to sleep through and watch back later, surprise fellow Europeans here.

Results and study progress seem secondary in the Netherlands, something you are entitled to without having to work too hard for it, while you develop yourself through student associations, gap years, hobbies and other expensive lifestyle choices.

We study at globally leading universities, allow ourselves one or two extra years, only need to get just over half of exam questions right, and most employers don’t even ask about our results.

Perhaps that is the real Dutch dream: the right to obtain a highly recognized degree with minimal effort, while complaining that we have to pay for our extra years of study ourselves and that the government cannot compensate us back to the 1990s.

Personally, I think the issue does not lie in the resources we are given, but in the fact that we simply have a different study culture, one in which development outside the academic setting is central. That is expensive and time-consuming, but ultimately a choice that every student makes for themselves.

Lars ten Hacken is a master’s student in Applied Physics at TU/e. He writes this column in a personal capacity. The views expressed in this column are his own.

This column was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.