Starting in the 1980s, a new wind began to blow through Dutch academia. As a result of the explosive increase in student and staff numbers and the surge of new, often small-scale degree programmes, higher education was becoming too expensive. The education minister intervened, and the universities were forced to reduce their degree offerings. The days in which students could study for ten or more years at the government's expense were a thing of the past. For the first time in its history, the University of Groningen formulated an international policy of its own aimed primarily at development cooperation. The university skilfully capitalized on important developments in world politics such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. This was not driven by idealism alone: free-market principles and a more commercial approach were increasingly gaining ground.

The extinction of the eternal student

One problem that universities had been facing since the 1950s was the long-term student. In the early 1960s, the Minister of Education had tried to reduce the duration of study to five years, but in practice, students often took seven to eight years to complete a degree. The ‘eternal student’ who spent over a decade studying, often while engaging in various extracurricular activities, was a well-known phenomenon.

It was only in the 1980s that the tide turned. Under pressure from an economic recession triggered by the oil crisis, the ever-growing costs of education became untenable, despite a lower growth rate in student numbers. Dutch universities were almost entirely funded by the central government, and students with less wealthy parents benefited from generous grants and loans. This free access to university education was a great common good, but it also led to un-manageable costs.

One of the most obvious ways to cut costs was to reduce the duration of study. From 1982 onwards, all degree programmes were reduced to a maximum of four years. This measure had some effect: the study pace slowly increased, and longterm students became rare. The measure became more effective when it was coupled with financial incentives. As of 1986, students who exceeded their maximum duration by more than two years were forced to pay for the rest of their study themselves.