Dutch government backs down on foreign language test for university courses

The Dutch government has scrapped plans to impose a strict foreign language teaching test on existing university programmes. The move comes after sustained opposition from universities and growing concerns about the potential impact on higher education and the labour market.

Education Minister Eppo Bruins informed parliament that the proposed test, named TAO, which was part of the "internationalisation in balance" bill, will now only apply to newly created undergraduate programmes. The bill aimed to reduce the number of international students by ensuring that no more than one-third of teaching in any course was delivered in a language other than Dutch — unless strict conditions were met.

Universities warned of ‘Massacre’

As per a report by Times Higher Education, under the original plan, both new and existing programmes would have faced the TAO assessment. Caspar van den Berg, president of the Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), had earlier warned that implementing the test across the board would result in a “massacre of programmes.”

In a statement following the reversal, van den Berg welcomed the decision. “Very good news for universities and for the Netherlands,” he said to Times Higher Education. “The TAO would have been disastrous for our education, the labour market and the vitality of border and shrinking regions.”

TAO still applies to new programmes

While the test has been dropped for existing undergraduate courses, it will still apply to all new programmes. To qualify for delivering over a third of their instruction in a foreign language, new courses must meet one of four conditions:

• Address a sector facing labour shortages
• Be taught in a region with only one provider
• Be located in a border area or in a region with declining population
• Be deemed “inherently international”

The government has also directed universities to compile an inventory of all current non-Dutch-language courses.

Universities offered alternative plan

Earlier this year, Dutch universities proposed a “self-management plan” in response to the proposed reforms. This included voluntarily reducing the number of English-taught courses and converting others into Dutch, in exchange for exempting existing programmes from the TAO.

Minister Bruins acknowledged in his letter that he had advised against exempting existing programmes but accepted the parliament’s motion. He said the universities’ proposal showed “concrete intentions to bring internationalisation in higher professional education and university education into balance.”

Drop in international student numbers

According to UNL data, student registrations from the European Economic Area are already down by 4.5 per cent for the upcoming academic year compared to 2024–25, and 11 per cent lower than 2023–24. Global registrations have dropped by 3 per cent year-on-year.

“These figures show that universities are gaining more and more control over the influx of international students thanks to the measures taken,” van den Berg said. “But we also see that the image of the Netherlands as an attractive place to work and study has suffered a lot of damage.”

He urged the Dutch government to develop a national talent strategy to help retain and attract skilled individuals from abroad.