The Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education (NUFFIC) plans to significantly reduce its budget for scholarships to incoming students from developing countries, affecting the so-called Netherlands Fellowship Programmesfor the academic year 2011/2012. In Enschede, the measure significantly affects the UT’s Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC).
The sixth faculty of the UT relies on the funding for their degree courses (MSc and PGD). Fifty percent is funded by NUFFIC scholarships. Where it could still offer ninety grants to incoming professionals from developing countries this academic year, next academic year only 50 grants will be available.
For the following academic years, the number of available scholarships is expected to drop even further. The faculty is now looking for alternative sources of funding, including increasing their cooperation with private companies, while it may also seek to expand existing online educational programs into a ‘virtual campus.’ The reduction in NUFFIC grants is a result of wider budget cutbacks by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the area of development assistance: from 0.8% to 0.7% of the Dutch National Gross Product.
