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.
Same in the UK to be fair. Even worse is that we see a lot of Chinese students coming in and bringing their biases about things like Hong Kong with them and the unis are scared to challenge them as they don't want to lose out on those sweet, sweet international fees.
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Netherlands made such a mess out of their higher education system, so they might as well do it.
They basically tried to set up a system where universities were financially incentivised to bring as many third-country national students in as possible, milk them with tuition fees, but not give a damn about where those people are going to live.
They could remove the incentive on the side of the university admin, but they aren't, for whatever reason. So the government is instead trying to raise the bar for the prospective students, which is just a roundabout way to achieve the same policy.
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