Stay rates foreign students 'shortage sectors' relatively high

The report shows that it matters a lot what study foreign students did and where they come from, whether they stay in the Netherlands after their studies or not. About 40% of international engineering and ICT students still live in the Netherlands a year after graduation, and a large proportion of them also work here. Didier Fouarge, director of ROA: "This means for the labor market that over 1 in 6 graduates with a master's degree in Engineering or ICT are foreign, and mostly from outside the European Union. So they make up a significant part of the new labor supply for these fields." 

For economics and society majors, about 19% still live in the Netherlands one year after graduation. Since by far the majority of foreign students study in these directions, although the number of foreign students staying in the Netherlands is higher, relatively speaking, the chance of staying is thus much smaller. Fouarge indicates that many students from Germany and Belgium are enrolled in these directions who are likely to return after graduation. 

For the fields of education and health care, the chance of staying is also high, but the number of foreign students is low. Because these programs are mostly Dutch-speaking, they are less accessible to foreign students, but the stay probability of the students who do come is high. 

To make labor market forecasts, it is important to know what proportion of international students plan to stay in the Netherlands or try to find a job in the Netherlands. Didier Fouarge: "Because we are talking about large numbers with very different stay rates, it would be quite wrong to assume that all international students might want to stay and work in the Netherlands or, on the contrary, that none of them would."

The fact that a group of foreign students stays in the Netherlands after graduation, especially in the sectors with more tightness, increases the supply in the labor market. Bottlenecks in the labor market could be reduced if more foreign students stayed in the Netherlands than is currently the case. In doing so, a few key findings emerged from the study. The research shows that the majority of students leave the Netherlands immediately after graduation. The graduates who stay mainly move to the 5 largest cities in the Netherlands. Fouarge: "policies to retain more students for the Dutch labor market should therefore already be targeted to encourage students to stay in the Netherlands during their studies."