Search news

Top students receive their tuition fees back

Top of the pack? Money back!
Maastricht University (UM) cherishes and stimulates talent. But the university not only pays lip service to this policy; starting this year, top students will receive concrete rewards. The best 3% of students are eligible for a grant to the value of their annual tuition fees. Announced in September 2006, this groundbreaking scheme is now underway for all first-year bachelor’s and master’s students for the 2007/08 academic year. This first batch of students will receive their top 3% certificates during a festive ceremony on 30 October. The scheme will also be introduced for second-year students next year, and third-year students from the following year.

The approximately 140 recipients reflect the university’s international student population. The majority come from Germany (62), the Netherlands (55) and Belgium (11), with the rest hailing from Austria, China, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia and the US.

The top 3% scheme is a concrete manifestation of UM’s policy to attract, stimulate, cherish and reward talented students. Maastricht University plays a pioneering role in national and international higher education in the fields of talent development, promotion of education performance and high-quality education. The latter partly depends on the combination of good education and motivated, talented students. The 3% scheme, then, is one measure to attract talented students from the Netherlands and elsewhere, which in turn favourably affects other students, as student interaction plays a key role in UM’s Problem-Based Learning (PBL) method. Thus, the other students directly benefit from the presence of talented students, and the quality of education receives extra impetus.

The 3% scheme shows that Maastricht University is genuinely prepared to invest in talent development and education quality. This is important, especially in a country that makes an active effort to develop an internationally recognised knowledge economy. The total funding involved for the first batch of recipients is around €250,000; this figure will see a sharp increase in the coming years when the scheme is introduced for all study years and student numbers continue to grow (including the share of non-EU/EEA students, who pay higher tuition fees).

The top 3% of students are selected per faculty, each of which formulate their own selection criteria on the basis of university-wide conditions. Students can compete for the prize every year. In other words, those who manage to belong to the top 3% each year can do their entire studies ‘for free’ – that is, with full compensation of their tuition fees – on the condition that they continue their studies at UM in the following study year. Naturally this does not apply to students in one-year programmes; they will be reimbursed in the form of a prize.