“Ending the PhD student grant scheme will result in the loss of talent at the Faculty of Science”
Just over a year ago, the Faculty of Science (FNWI) decided to stop admitting PhD students funded through external grants, citing concerns about workplace inequality and the position of Chinese PhD candidates. The faculty’s approach differs from that of the rest of the UvA, where grant-funded PhD positions are still permitted. Within FNWI, the move has led to dissatisfaction among some professors. “It restricts our academic freedom.”
Over the past ten years, Stanley Brul, professor of molecular biology at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS), has supervised around fifteen PhD students on scholarships, the majority of whom were from China. He now has just one left. “I still receive many emails from scholarship PhD students applying for positions; there are often some very good ones among them. We are now missing out on these researchers, who are turning to other universities.”
Scholarship PhD students are PhD candidates who do not have an employment contract with the university but are pursuing their PhDs on an external scholarship. These are often international PhD students pursuing their PhDs on a scholarship from their own country. In total, there are around 3,800 scholarship PhD students in the Netherlands; the majority, around 2,200, come from China. This is because the Chinese government invests heavily in PhD students abroad through the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC). At the UvA, there are currently around 300 scholarship PhD students, 64 of whom are at the Faculty of Science (FNWI).
In recent years, there has been regular debate about these Chinese PhD students, and Dutch universities have become more cautious about admitting CSC PhD students. There are ethical issues at play – for example, Chinese PhD students must swear allegiance to the Communist Party in order to receive the scholarship – and there are concerns about knowledge security: what does it mean if China gains access to the knowledge of Dutch universities? And the meagre scholarship on which scholarship PhD students have to survive, as reported by Folia, was a regular topic of discussion.
Free PhD student intake freeze
In the spring of 2025, the Faculty of Science, Mathematics and Computer Science (FNWI) decided to introduce a freeze on the intake of PhD students on scholarships. This followed a legal case involving PhD students on scholarships at the University of Groningen, according to a report by the FNWI management team from November. The court ruled in favour of the PhD students on grants, who claimed they had an employment contract with the university, after which the university was required to pay the lost income. The case thus demonstrated that universities run legal and financial risks when working with PhD students on grants.
“The decision to stop using PhD students on grants wasn’t really a major topic in the Works Council (OR) at the time,” says PhD student and Works Council member Martijn Brehm. “Among PhD students, I notice that the grant-funded PhD student arrangement isn’t very popular. The poorer employment conditions for grant-funded PhD students create a two-tier system in the workplace. To me, grant-funded PhD students feel like a loophole the UvA is using to get around the collective labour agreement.”
Impact
Not everyone shares this view. According to Leendert Hamoen, professor of general microbiology, PhD students funded by grants offer a unique opportunity to build expertise in a research area. PhD students funded by grants bring their own funding and make it possible to conduct new and complex research. Hamoen: “As a professor, you no longer receive PhD students from the first-stream funding that you can deploy freely. To be eligible for a research grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), which allows you to hire a PhD student, you must first demonstrate extensive results in the form of publications.”
Thanks to PhD students from China, he has been able to build up advanced expertise within his research group in recent years. “Based on the complex, experimental techniques these PhD students have developed, I can now secure funding for further research from NWO and companies. Due to the scholarship ban, we are really losing ground in certain areas.”
Funding and knowledge security
The objections to working with Chinese scholarship PhD students are now outdated, according to Hamoen and Brul. “Knowledge security has long been one of the arguments against collaborating with Chinese scholarship PhD students,” says Brul. “But decisions have been made on that front. Sensitive research, for example in the case of military applications, is no longer carried out with CSC PhD students; rules have been put in place for that.” Hamoen also finds the argument of knowledge security too simplistic. “Most research is very fundamental in nature and, without scholarship students, it simply wouldn’t be carried out at all.”
Another reason for discontinuing the scholarship scheme is the tight financial constraints. The Chinese government scholarship amounted to around 1,000 to 1,500 euros per month; the UvA topped that up to the minimum wage. Brul: “That issue no longer applies because the CSC has now increased the scholarship itself.” Even so, the pay of these PhD students is still not on a par with that of employed PhD students, who do virtually the same work. Brul: “That is not a fair situation. But it is something these PhD students have signed up for themselves. And this does give the PhD students the opportunity to conduct research at the UvA; with the end of the grant scheme, that opportunity would disappear entirely.”
Hamoen agrees. “What they’re actually saying is: even if it’s your dream to do a PhD at a top university and you can afford it, you don’t need to come here because you’ll earn less than our other PhD students. I find that rather dismissive from our position.”
Satisfaction
Moreover, the professors say it is rewarding to work with talented PhD candidates from other countries. Hamoen: “The PhD candidates gain an insight into how things work in the Netherlands and take the expertise gained from the research back to their own countries. In this way, you also build a relationship with other countries that may prove useful in the future.” All his PhD students on grants have also gone on to do well, says Brul. He mentions Harvard, postdoc positions in the US and the UK, a job in the Netherlands and positions in China.
With the freeze on PhD grants, PhD students are also missing out on the chance to gain experience at the UvA, argues Brul. “And I’m not so much talking about China; they don’t need much development in terms of science – it’s rather the other way round. But the chance that PhD students from, say, Africa can come here is also reduced as a result. If I advertise a regular PhD position here, I get hundreds of applications. The chance of a researcher from outside the EU getting through that process is very small.”
What particularly bothers the professors is that the discussion is not being conducted fairly. Hamoen: “It is a subjective choice made by the dean and not by UvA central administration. Ultimately, it is a personal matter; I estimate the split within the faculty is fifty-fifty between supporters and opponents of this policy. But the point is, when will research leaders be allowed to make a decision themselves? Our academic freedom is being increasingly restricted in this way.”
The UvA spokesperson stated in a response that the Faculty of Science has indeed stopped accepting any PhD students on grants who receive remuneration that does not come close to the salary of PhD students appointed by the faculty. PhD students on grants who do receive an equal salary are welcome, but in practice there are none. In doing so, the faculty aims to ensure “equivalent terms of employment for all PhD students – financially, but also when it comes to supervising Master’s students and potentially delivering teaching,” according to the spokesperson.
Negotiations
At central level, it is still possible to work with PhD students on grants. Although this has become more difficult for Chinese PhD students in recent years. This is due to the fact that there is currently no agreement between the UvA and the CSC. In March 2025, the UvA Advisory Committee on Cooperation with Third Parties concluded that the agreement, the so-called Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), could be renewed on condition that risk-mitigating measures were put in place to safeguard “academic freedom, knowledge security, data privacy and the safety of PhD candidates”. The UvA and the CSC are currently negotiating this.
At present, it is therefore not possible to recruit Chinese PhD students on scholarships via the institutional route. This does not mean, however, that UvA researchers outside the Faculty of Science can no longer work with Chinese PhD students on scholarships at all. Chinese PhD students on scholarships can also secure a position at the UvA through individual UvA professors and submit an application to the Chinese government themselves. This route was already used before the MoU was first signed in 2013 and can still be used today. In such cases, too, the research proposal must comply with the requirements of the UvA Guidelines for External Collaborations, the ethical framework under which UvA staff have been required to assess new collaborations themselves since July 2025.
