Competing for the brightest minds?
Dutch policy-makers and higher education institutions need to be aware of policy developments in other countries, so they can formulate better recruitment strategies and attract the right kinds of foreign students. A new Nuffic report provides an up-to-date overview of international student recruitment policies.
The report also analyses recruitment strategies and policy instruments, and offers suggestions to strengthen the national policy framework.
The global market for international students
One of the main conclusions is that more and more countries are competing to recruit international students from the same pool of countries (often in Asia or Latin America). At the same time, the division between the ‘recruiting’ and ‘target recruitment’ countries is becoming obsolete.
Several countries are key recruitment countries for other nations, while they are also actively recruiting foreign students themselves.
The Netherlands compared
The number of foreign students in the Netherlands has increased more than in other European countries. However, their percentage in Dutch higher education still lags behind many other countries.
With its elaborate offer of English-taught degree programmes and a one-year period for foreign students to look for work after studying, the Netherlands is an attractive study destination.
On the other hand, non-EU tuition fees and visa costs are high, and there are few government scholarships for foreign students.
Focus, vision and coherence
The report has three key conclusions.
First, national governments in several other countries have shifted their focus from quantity to quality, emphasising student recruitment at master’s and doctoral levels. Some governments have also linked international recruitment to specific course areas that experience a shortage of domestic students and that are crucial to national economic development (such as science and technology).
Second, several governments are integrating international student recruitment into broader forms of cooperation in international higher education. For example as a part of international double degree programmes and bilateral research collaborations which include international student mobility.
This is a way to ‘guarantee’ in the longer term, the influx of talented foreign students from selected, foreign partner institutions.
Third, international student recruitment is most effective when there is, at the national level:
- a focused international student recruitment strategy;
- a link between this strategy and national research agendas and bilateral cooperation;
- integration of the strategy with foreign economic and cultural policy;
- consistency in pursuing the strategy over a longer period of time.
Download the full report