https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/28/a-worrying-trend-dutch-universities-rebel-against-plan-to-limit-english-courses
The Dutch government's aim is to reduce the amount of English content of standard bachelor’s degrees to only one third of course credits.
IMHO I don't think removing the incentives on the side of the university would be enough to decrease the number of international students in the short term. Even without advertising by the universities, the Netherlands is a popular choice precisely because you can do almost every degree in English without having to learn another language. Combine this with fairly high-ranking universities, high quality quality of life, almost everyone outside of uni speaking English and I don't think removing incentives would have much of an effect.
I think this is probably the best solution in the short term, especially for Dutch students.
Even without advertising by the universities, the Netherlands is a popular choice
The missing piece of the puzzle here is that I am not really in favour of unrestricted admissions, which is the norm in many western European countries, including NL.
My reform would be to 1. set up a minimum standard of education that I want to offer to the students 2. take stock of my institutional resources and see how many students I can offer quality education to, 3. work with my local community to see how many out-of-city students we can house in humane conditions, 4. bring tuition down to non-profit rates (third-country nationals will pay at-cost prices but they won't subsidise others with inflated fees), 5. only admit as many students as I can reasonably educate in high quality conditions based on the outcomes of the previous four points.
In other words, I believe that Numerus clausus should be the norm, not the exception. The universities may remain attractive, but they can simply not admit not admit more students than they can support.
Whether it makes sense to offer degrees in English after my reforms remains to be seen. Maybe it still does, maybe it doesn't - but my priority is that students get quality education no matter what. What language it is in is more of a practicality in my eyes.
I pretty much agree with you on that. I would only add that some priority aught to be given to local students (as in both in-city and regional out-of-city students). Otherwise you could end up with the situation where, if there are still a lot more applications from international students compared to local students, they could force out local students who cannot afford to go study somewhere else.
One issue with changing the current system is that unrestricted admissions of out-of-city students isn't just a norm in western European countries. I'm pretty sure there is an EU law that you are not allowed to discriminate between domestic and international students and changing that would undoubtedly cause political issues. I hope they do change that it in the future, but that is more of a medium term solution.
Therefore, I still think this is probably the best short term solution.