Volt and Forum voor Democratie (FvD) have now also announced their draft election manifestos. There are only a few parties that haven’t done so yet. D66, for example, is waiting till the end of this week.
Volt and FvD are pretty much each other’s polar opposites. The first party was founded to promote a strong Europe, the second wants to leave the European Union and lift sanctions against Russia.
The overlap? Both parties want a higher basic student grant. They also want to make funding for higher education institutions less dependent on ‘output’ (FvD) or ‘performance’ (Volt).
Volt
“We’re immediately reversing the cuts in education and increasing the overall budget for education, research and science”, Volt’s draft manifesto reads. “We’re investing this money in the foundation of our knowledge economy, the human capital of our country.”
However, the money is to be distributed in a different way. As far as Volt is concerned, education institutions will “no longer have to spend marketing budgets looking for as many registrations as possible”. Funding should focus more on “public values such as accessibility, small scale, quality of supervision, research ethics and regional collaboration”.
The party also wants to better manage the influx of foreign students. That is to say, Volt advocates “phasing out performance funding and reforming international student recruitment”. Though not put in exactly these terms, it means that Volt wants funding to become less dependent on criteria such as student numbers and degrees awarded.
Furthermore, the party wants to boost organised student communities with tuition fee exemption: free enrolment at your higher education institution as long as you’re on the board of an association. This would be an example of “citizenship in practice”.
What’s more, the party wants lower interest rates on student debt and a higher basic student grant (or even better: a basic income for everyone, but that’s another discussion). That higher grant would be dependent on parental income.
Also important for students’ finances: “We start by abolishing tuition fees for programmes that train students for crucial/vital professions and sectors, such as ICT, engineering, construction, education and healthcare.”
Furthermore, the party wants to convert the binding recommendation on continuation of studies at the end of the first academic year into a ‘non-binding recommendation’. In other words, programmes would no longer be allowed to dismiss first-year students if they fail to earn enough credits. The programmes can give a recommendation, but the student makes the final decision.
Forum voor Democratie
While the party’s election manifesto calls for normalising relations with Russia, FvD’s domestic concerns include freedom of expression at universities in the Netherlands. To ensure that freedom, the party wants to issue a ban. “We’re banning cancel culture, diversity officers and safe spaces”, says the draft election manifesto.
What’s more, higher education institutions are to become smaller. “In recent decades, higher education has been eroded by massification, internationalisation and levelling”, the FvD manifesto reads.
Therefore, stricter admission requirements for higher education are to be introduced. In addition, educational institutions should no longer receive money per degree awarded. This would shift their focus back to quality rather than quantity, FvD believes.
The influx of students from abroad must also be reduced. “The number of international students must be severely curbed, so that universities focus primarily on Dutch students and culture.”
Research funding body NWO is to be dismantled, to the benefit of research universities. This would allow for greater diversity in the research professors are able to conduct. Universities of applied sciences, on the other hand, are given less freedom. These must “work more closely with industry and regional institutions so that graduates are immediately employable in practice”.
FvD would also like to increase the basic student grant and give students a ‘broader public transport pass’, arguing that this would improve the ‘accessibility’ of higher education. However, this would only apply to the “motivated and talented students” who are still permitted to enrol.