The current cabinet office is planning to make drastic cutbacks in education and research. As it stands now, these will amount to more than one billion euros in total. Bachelor’s and master’s students will be most affected by the lowering of the basic student grant (by 160 euros) and the introduction of the long term study penalty.

This is why the National Student Union (LSVb) will organize a national protest in The Hague on Friday, October 18, against the long term study penalty and for an increase of the basic grant. Student party Groep-één is hoping to find as many TU/e students as possible to travel to The Hague together and make their voices heard.

Touring bus

As many students have a public transport subscription that’s only valid on weekends, traveling by train isn’t an option, Groep-één member Gabriël Nusselder explains. “With a subscription like that, you can only travel for free from 12 noon onward, but we have to leave earlier than that.” This is why Groep-één came up with the idea of renting a large touring bus. This was also going to cost money – about a thousand euros – but they found two sponsors who were willing to share the amount: protest organizer LSVb and the University Fund Eindhoven (UFe).

According to Ton Backx, director of the UFe, it’s ‘self-explanatory’ that the fund is chipping in to realize this initiative. “One of the goals of the university fund is to help students in need. And in the Netherlands, we have a very specific generation of students that are simply being treated differently than the ones before them. Take the student grants that were discontinued, made a comeback, and are now being lowered again, but also the long term study penalty that is expected to be introduced. It’s self-explanatory that students are protesting against this and it’s also self-explanatory that we as a university fund are helping them do so.”

Sixty seats

The touring van will seat sixty people. “More than thirty students already confirmed they’re coming, so the bus should be booked out by Friday,” Nusselder says contentedly. Everyone can join the protest this Friday. You can of course make your own way there, but you’re also welcome on the Groep-één bus. Those wanting to travel on the touring bus do need to sign up in this WhatsApp group.

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This many TU/e students would get the long term study penalty

For the moment, it looks like the long term study penalty will take effect in the 2026/2027 academic year. The idea is that every student who takes more than one year extra to complete their studies will have to pay the penalty. The cabinet office expects one in eight students to have to pay the long term study penalty, which would put about 282 million euros per year into the state treasury.

TU/e’s BI portal shows how many students are on track to obtain their diplomas with a delay of less than a year (or zero delay). In other words, which percentage of students would not receive the penalty under the new regime? For bachelor’s students, this percentage was around seventy percent in recent academic years (2015/2016 thru 2019/2020). This would mean approximately thirty percent would receive the penalty. For Master’s students, the percentage without any serious delays was a bit higher, around 73 percent. This would mean about 27 percent of them would get the penalty.

In reality, the percentage of TU/e students receiving the long term study penalty will be even higher should the scheme make it through parliament, because the BI portal actually shows the graduation percentages per study program. When a student changes programs, it’s possible they will graduate within the allocated time, but will still get the penalty because they were previously enrolled in another program.