{"id":171638,"date":"2024-09-19T11:05:43","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T09:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=171638"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:27:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:27:28","slug":"budget-day-feasible-or-not-cutbacks-are-going-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2024\/09\/19\/budget-day-feasible-or-not-cutbacks-are-going-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Budget Day: feasible or not, cutbacks are going ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fewer international students, the slow-progress penalty… Even if the plans turn out not to be feasible, the cabinet is going to cut the higher education and research budget by hundreds of millions of euros.<\/p>\n

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The universities will already be affected by the cutbacks next year, the budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science for the year 2025 shows. Universities of applied sciences won\u2019t be hit quite as hard. Most of the plans were already known, but now they\u2019ve been concretised with the exact amounts and dates.<\/p>\n

Slow-progress penalty<\/h2>

The slow-progress penalty is to start paying off in 2026: 95 million euros. In the years after that, this amount will be over 280 million euros. That\u2019s what it says in the budget, at least, even though officials warned last spring that this cost saving cannot be made that quickly.<\/p>\n

Internationals<\/h2>

Something similar applies to the reduction of the number of international students. The cabinet is counting on saving 29 million euros in 2026, climbing to 272 million euros three year later.<\/p>\n

But higher education institutions have to cooperate on this, and according to the officials they \u2018don\u2019t benefit from it directly\u2019. So the question is whether there will actually be fewer international students and, if so, how much fewer.<\/p>\n

Cabinet wants to talk<\/h2>

Nonetheless, higher education institutions will have to realise the aforementioned savings one way or another. \u201cThe budget cuts come to a hefty total\u201d, Minister of Education Eppo Bruins acknowledges in a press release. \u201cThe exact shape those cuts will take is not yet set in stone in all cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

In any case, the cutbacks will not be withdrawn for the moment. In their outline agreement, the coalition parties agreed that \u2018setbacks\u2019 will be compensated by the ministries themselves. In other words, if one cutback isn\u2019t feasible, it will be replaced by another.<\/p>\n\n\t

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