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Education

Choosing a degree? Check out the guide

By 2014, all degree programmes in the Netherlands are required to publish a guide. If this is not done voluntarily, legislation will follow, said state secretary Halbe Zijlstra on 19 June during parliamentary question time.

This statement has followed years of complaints from student and youth organizations about misleading recruitment material. This mainly consists of glossy folders that trade in positive stories but don’t tell you anything about essential points such as the pass rate and the job prospects. The guide of the future should include a few hard facts and figures that make fast and fair comparisons possible. Four applied sciences universities, Windesheim, HAN, Saxion and the Hanzehogeschool, are ahead of the pack on this point. In their ‘degree in figures’ they report on the amount of class time, the student numbers and the grade awarded to each programme in the National Student Survey. MP Anne-Wil Lucas (VVD), who asked questions about this on 19 June, would prefer to see faster progress. She praised the four applied science universities, but thinks the introduction of the guides should be enforced with immediate effect. She find it particularly unacceptable that in September 2013, thousands of students will yet again embark on degrees ‘without good information beforehand’.

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