Students have not started to study faster or slower since the loan system was introduced in 2015, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) concluded after researching the student years of several hundred thousand young people. HBO and WO graduates also change programs just as often as before.
Relatively fewer students did transfer from a bachelor’s program to a master’s program, says Statistics Netherlands. For example, in 2014, a year before the introduction of the loan system, 85 percent of the students started a master after their bachelor’s degree. In 2018 that had dropped to 70 percent.
Of these, students from the least affluent families more often succeeded in completing the master’s degree in one year than students from more affluent backgrounds. Statistics Netherlands suspects that students from the first group may experience pressure to complete their degree program within the time officially set for it.
Loan system
The student loan system at the college and university was introduced in 2015, as a replacement for the basic grant. HBO and WO students can borrow an amount from the government every month and must repay their accumulated debt within 35 years. Students from less affluent families can still receive an additional scholarship.
At the end of last year, it turned out that about 70 percent of students in higher education borrow money to study. In 2019, this amounted to an average of 700 euros per month.
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