‘Study grant rules too strict after parental break’

In addition to their student finance and part-time jobs, students receive financial support from their parents – or at least, that is the government’s assumption. However, some students no longer have contact with one or both parents.

A special scheme has been created for them. In cases of a ‘serious and structural’ conflict – such as a history of abuse, neglect, or mistreatment – students can receive an additional grant without student finance provider DUO taking their parents’ income into account.

But the threshold is too high, says Mylou Miché, chair of the student organisation ISO. “Many students don’t even get around to applying”, she says. “The rules don’t protect students; they work against them.”

She speaks from personal experience. Miché no longer has contact with her father. She does not wish to share details publicly, but the situation is serious enough. She wanted to apply to have her father’s income disregarded.

But it didn’t work out. She was required to provide evidence of their conflict, but her psychologist was unable to issue a statement due to privacy legislation. So she had to tell her story to someone else, such as a student counsellor she barely knew. “The rules make things unnecessarily difficult for students,” says Miché. “When a parent disappears from your life, it is a huge emotional burden, and then you have to convince someone else of this with all kinds of evidence. The process was so stressful that after a while, I thought: never mind. It’s not worth it.”

She is not the only one for whom the threshold is too high, Miché believes. “One student was told: ‘Your father transferred ten euros to you for your birthday, so there was still contact.’ What can you say to that? The system needs to change. Right now, it is based on resistance and distrust, while the student is already the victim of the situation.”

DUO’s website lists several criteria for eligibility for the scheme, including that students must not have had contact with their parent since their twelfth birthday. So if at age fourteen they once had tea together, DUO may doubt their claim: is it really true?

A break can also occur later in life. Regardless, students must submit various documents, such as a copy of the ‘full divorce decree’ if their parents were married. They must also provide ‘detailed’ statements from themselves, the other parent, and an ‘expert’, such as a psychologist or social worker.

Still, it is not impossible to receive the grant. According to a DUO spokesperson, around two hundred applications are submitted each week, with 40 per cent being approved. This amounts to over four thousand new grants per year. These also include cases where parents are ‘untraceable’, for instance, if they have moved abroad.

These numbers do little to impress Miché. “It could be many more”, she believes. The ISO will soon meet with policymakers from the Ministry of Education.

In addition to DUO, judges are also strict when students challenge a rejection. In fact, they are becoming increasingly strict, says legal expert Job Buiting in the legal journal Ars Aequi. The fact that several thousand students do receive the grant, he argues, does not mean that others are not being wrongly rejected.

Buiting studied 94 court rulings from the past twenty years. He believes it has become nearly impossible to win such cases. One student, for example, had been psychologically abused by her stepfather and no longer had contact with her mother, yet the Central Appeals Tribunal ruled this was insufficient grounds. One reason: she had attempted to contact her mother, even though her mother had not responded.

Another student had been physically abused by his parents in the past. However, the court did not find this argument sufficient either, as the abuse was no longer ongoing at the time of his grant application.

As a result, students in such situations are forced to take legal action against their parents to claim ‘child maintenance’, or parental financial support. If they still fail to obtain the money they are entitled to, they can return to DUO. “Deeply unfair,” Buiting says.

Buiting was unaware that over 4,000 students per year receive the additional grant through this scheme, but he says this does not really matter to him. He sees that students have virtually no chance in court, ‘even when the scheme is clearly intended for them’.

HOP requested examples from DUO of students who do or do not qualify under the scheme. DUO needed time to consider its response.

Meanwhile, the GroenLinks-PvdA party has submitted written questions about Buiting’s article, which Minister Eppo Bruins has yet to answer. Until then, DUO is refusing to comment.

The previous minister, Robbert Dijkgraaf, recognised the problem. In some cases, for example, students were required to submit a statement from the very parent who was refusing to provide support.

“The requirement for a statement from the uncooperative parent can lead to painful situations,” Dijkgraaf wrote to the House of Representatives in June 2023, “because it forces the student to contact the very parent with whom they have a conflict. I want to explore alternative approaches while considering the risks of misuse or fraud and any financial consequences.”

In any case, DUO had pledged to ‘step up efforts to inform students at educational institutions’. What has come of this? DUO is not commenting on that either.