How Dutch students are influenced by their international peers
Political views, relationships, or even marriage: Dutch students who shared their lecture halls with international peers appear to have been influenced by this in various ways even years later. This is shown by research conducted by UvA PhD candidate Stanislav Avdeev.
You conducted research into how Dutch students are influenced in the long term by studying alongside international students. What stood out?
“Studying with international students influences a wide range of factors among Dutch students, particularly in the social sphere. For example, the likelihood increases that later in life you will cohabit with someone who is not from the Netherlands, or even marry them. Students who studied with internationals also genuinely appear to be more open to the rest of the world, and for instance move abroad significantly more often.”
I even saw an increase of 4.2 per cent in the likelihood of marrying someone from outside the Netherlands. Are these often relationships that began in the lecture halls?
“No, these relationships explicitly did not begin within the degree programme. They really involve people who later married someone from outside the university. Of course, it may be the case that they met their future husband or wife during that same period, but in any case not as fellow students. This shows that studying with international students has a lasting effect even after graduation on how open people are to the idea of marrying an international partner.”
Which other findings were notable?
“You can see that students who studied alongside internationals are more positive about European cooperation, and more often believe that migrants should have the same rights as Dutch citizens. They are also less negative about migrants moving into their neighbourhoods. Incidentally, no distinction was made here between expats and refugees.”
How intensive did the contact between students during their studies need to be in order to bring about these kinds of social effects?
“How this process actually unfolds in practice is difficult to say. It could well be related to positive interpersonal experiences, but we do not know that for certain. Using data from Statistics Netherlands, I looked at students in the first year of their bachelor’s degree, and at the number of international students enrolled in that specific cohort. I therefore do not know whether friendships developed, or to what extent Dutch students interacted with their international fellow students. I only observe that they studied together in that first year, and therefore most likely did have some form of contact.”
“In order to keep all other factors that might have an influence constant, I consistently compare the student population of one specific bachelor’s programme with that same programme, but then from a different cohort. This allows us to assume that the course content, lectures and wider context remained more or less the same, while only the exact number of international students fluctuates from year to year. I make use of that variation to see how Dutch students are influenced by the presence of international students.”
These results all sound fairly intuitive: people who spend more time with a particular group are likely to think more positively about them.
“That is indeed an existing theory, which holds that exposure to a particular group influences certain attitudes. I have now tested that theory in the specific context of the university. In the United States, this kind of research is often examined through the lens of race, which makes this approach slightly different. In essence, it is a further reinforcement of that theory.”
You also looked at how Dutch students fared later in life on the labour market. What effect did you observe there?
“In the debate about internationalisation at universities, it is often claimed that a high number of international students has a negative impact on educational quality, but my research shows no such effect at all. Studying with more international students has no influence on labour market performance later in life.”
What does that tell us?
“At present, the number of international students in the Netherlands, as well as in other countries, is being restricted through policy measures. But it now appears that the presumed negative effect on educational quality does not exist, while the positive social effects are demonstrably measurable. From that, one could conclude that the current restrictive policy is not in the best interests of the university. Such insights could be taken into account in policymaking.”
Do you see this research as a kind of scientific rebuttal of xenophobia?
“You can never be certain how this research will be interpreted, but I at least wanted to show that scepticism towards international students is not justified. That said, it is of course a very local effect, measured within one specific group. These Dutch students consciously choose a context in which they come into contact with internationals; I cannot generalise the positive effects they experience to society as a whole. There are many different factors that shape attitudes, and it may well be that other groups would respond far less positively.”
