Open letter to the House of Representatives: Vote against further dismantling of the Dutch promotion system!

Tomorrow, the CDA will submit a motion to the VAO Science Policy Committee calling for the expansion of the PhD student experiment, which is primarily taking place at the University of Groningen. Within this experiment, PhD candidates are not appointed as employees, as is common practice in the Netherlands, but as students with a grant. They do not accrue a pension, are not protected by the collective labor agreement, and earn a total of approximately €20,000 less net than PhD employees. The CDA believes that if the interim evaluation of the experiment (currently underway) is positive, the experiment should be expanded further, as otherwise, the Netherlands would not produce enough PhDs. This position, however, is not consistent with the facts.

A lot is currently going wrong behind the scenes.  PhD candidates in Groningen   are increasingly turning against the experiment. The differences between employed PhD candidates and PhD students  appear to be virtually nonexistent , in which case, according to Minister Bussemaker, they  can demand an employee contract . The University of Groningen has not set aside any reserves to cover these costs, according to documents obtained by PNN through a Freedom of Information Act (Wob) request.

Nevertheless, the University of Groningen wants to expand the experiment to include hundreds more PhD students. The discussion is dominated by inaccurate and biased figures. Therefore, PNN brings the following points to your attention:

1. The interim evaluation currently being conducted by research agency CHEPS is not being conducted independently. The University of Groningen (UG) attempted to influence the results by encouraging participants to be positive about the experiment before interviews. The research agency is largely basing its findings on the UG's own evaluations and has so far refused to seriously investigate complaints from PhD students. For more information, see here , here  , and  here .
2. It's untrue  that the Netherlands produces few PhDs. Since 2011  , the Netherlands has consistently been in the EU top 5 of countries with the most PhDs among 25-34 year-olds . The fact that the Netherlands still scores average for PhDs in the total population  is because the Netherlands produced significantly fewer PhDs in the 1980s and 1990s than it does now. These figures, therefore, say nothing about the current situation.
3. Often, reference is made to the Scandinavian countries with which the Netherlands aims to compete. It is consistently omitted that  the Scandinavian countries also employ almost entirely PhD candidates, not PhD students . For example, Denmark (another country that appears annually in the aforementioned EU top 5) employs only PhD candidates. In Sweden, the majority of PhD candidates have long  been employed, and this has recently  been mandated by law . In Norway, too, PhD candidates are normally employed,  and there are very limited  grants available for international PhD candidates.
4. Within the experiment at the University of Groningen, international PhD candidates receive a top-up grant to supplement the low grant from their country of origin (often China).  PNN believes the position of these international PhD candidates with grants should be improved, but believes it's wrong to downgrade the high-quality Dutch PhD system to achieve this. Other universities that are not participating in the experiment, but also offer top-up grants to these international PhD candidates, illustrate that this can be done differently (for example, Delft University of Technology was the first to do so, even before the University of Groningen).

In short: we urge you not to support this motion. It strips hundreds more PhD students of their employment rights, while the arguments for this are largely flawed, and the situation at the University of Groningen leads to significant dissatisfaction and inequality, making it financially irresponsible.

On behalf of the PNN board,

Anne de Vries (chair)