How are the millions of euros saved by abolishing student grants being spent?

Student grants were abolished in 2015 and replaced with student loans. At the time, the then Minister for Education, Jet Bussemaker, promised that the higher education sector would be allocated an additional one billion euros each year, on top of its regular funding. That promise wasn’t really kept, and moreover, universities were told that it would take at least three years for the additional funding to become available.

In order to compensate the generation of students attending Dutch universities between 2015 and 2018, too, for the loss of their grants, universities promised to allocate considerable amounts from their own resources to projects designed to improve the quality of their degree programmes: the so-called ‘advance spending’.

As part of this research project, EM, in association with the editorial teams of several other university media, tried to figure out how those millions of euros were spent, and to what extent they actually improved the degree programmes taught at Dutch tertiary education institutes.

Altan Erdogan, Henk Strikkers, Laura ter Steege and Yvonne van de Meent contributed to this series. The Dutch Journalism Fund (Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek) helped fund the research.