Four students are spending their break at the Auditorium, all of them enrolled in Chemical Engineering and Chemistry. Two of them – Vicky Stergiou from Greece and Franek Klonowski from Poland – will pay 2530 euros for their studies next year. For Ashlyn D’Souza from India and Taline Chahine from Lebanon this amount will be 13,300 euros. They don’t think this is a large sum because tuition fees in Dubai, where they both lived for years, are much higher. And the same goes for countries like the United States and England.

This is confirmed by Marcel Visschers, who prepares a proposal on the institutional tuition fees for the Board of Education and the Executive Board on behalf of ESA every year. The University Council also has the right of approval. “We always set the tuition fees a year in advance, because students already have to start registering as early as October. We think they have a right to know what they’ll be paying for their studies. We adjusted the 2024-2025 fees for inflation, like we always do. This came down to eight percent this time; it was an expensive year.” Following the adjustment, ESA turns it into a nice round amount, so it can be easily split into the terms students generally use to pay, Visschers adds.

Institutional tuition fees in the past six years. Source: TU/e

Home front

To be able to pay for their studies, the parents of D’Souza and Chahine had to save up money for years. Chahine is yet to tell the home front that the tuition fees will now be increased by a thousand euros. “I wonder how that conversation will go, even though my parents do give priority to my studies.” Having said that, she doesn’t want the financial burden for her parents to become too big. D’Souza also worries about this. “I would like to lighten the burden on my mother and am therefore looking for work. But it’s difficult to find something, because I don’t speak Dutch and don’t have a work permit.”

Extra increase

The sum for students from outside the EU* consist of several parts. They pay the tuition fees that EU students pay as well. This is supplemented by part of the amount the university receives for every EU student. “As we don’t get any money from the government for students from outside the EU, education and support of this group of students is entirely paid out of the tuition fees,” says Visschers. “The amount must cover the costs. At the moment it actually doesn’t, which is why the tuition fees for new students will likely be increased further from 2025 onwards. The amount that the university receives for Dutch students consists of a fixed component and a variable component. Until now, non-EU students only paid the variable component, but from 2025 the fixed component will be added.” This brings the costs for a bachelor’s to 18,000 euros per year and for a master’s new students will be paying 21,000 euros from 2025 onwards. “For existing students we will keep adjusting the current amounts for inflation, like we’ve been doing until now.”

Universities of technology

Universities are free to decide the amount of institutional tuition fees, as long as it’s not lower than the statutory tuition fees. The University of Twente distinguishes between two groups of degree programs.

Bachelor’s:

Although TU/e’s fees don’t have anything to do with those at other universities, Visschers does keep half an eye on the amounts they charge. “I do this to make sure we’re not in a completely different ballpark. We’re currently at the lower end of the fee spectrum. We had already calculated that the current institutional tuition fees weren’t high enough. If you then see that they are considerable higher at other universities, you start to realize why that is.”

*By ‘students from outside the EU’, we mean students from outside the EU, EFTA and Surinam. This has been reduced to just ‘EU’ in the interest of readability.