Purpose: During the last decade, new continuing learning pathways have been designed and implemented in the Dutch Vocational Education and Training (VET) column aiming to foster students' transitions between successive educational levels. Prototypical examples of such continuing learning pathways are the Green Lyceum (GL) and the Technical Talent…

Purpose: In the Netherlands, thesis assessment quality is a growing concern for the national accreditation organization due to increasing student numbers and supervisor workload. However, the accreditation framework lacks guidance on how to meet quality standards. This study aims to address these issues by sharing our experience, identifying…

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, student well-being was highlighted as an important public health issue. The study aims to gain insights into the exact factors that bachelor and master students from engineering fields at Delft University of Technology are impacted by. Multiple interviews were performed to identify the key areas of impact and…

The advantages and drawbacks of components of flexible assessment have been studied mostly from the standpoint of students and, to a lesser extent, teachers. A gap persists in understanding the collective perspectives of teachers and students concerning flexible assessment. This study aimed to explore experiences and perspectives of students and…

Character building (CB) is a crucial aspect for basic psychologists who need to carry out their consultation tasks effectively. At Tilburg University, lecturers have the freedom to interpret the five CB dimensions and implement them in courses, including intellectual independence, critical mindset, social responsibility, scientific responsibility,…

TU Delft education system is transformed on three levels: (1) new courses and projects in existing B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs for multidisciplinary and reflective learning; (2) new M.Sc. programs focusing on multi and interdisciplinarity, personal development, and professional skills; and (3) central Interdisciplinary Projects for Master Students…

This paper compares the employment outcomes of liberal arts graduates from Dutch university colleges with those of their peers who pursued conventional, subject-specific bachelor's degrees. Using data from the Dutch National Alumni Survey, the analysis includes 14,933 respondents who completed a master's programme at a research university, with…

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft's approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach…

This paper contributes to the research on discrepancy between employers' needs and graduates' competencies acquired at bachelor education. Given the fact that internationalizing SMEs have considered international relation competency (IRC) to be the key competency for starting export professionals, this qualitative study examines whether this key…

Continuing learning pathways have been proposed as curriculum design solutions to reduce student drop-out rates and to promote their transitions to successive levels of the educational system. The present study aimed to compare the effects of a specific continuing learning pathway in Dutch VET (the Green Lyceum or GL, which combines a lower…

Whether a broad undergraduate curriculum prepares students well for academic and professional specialization is a much-debated question. This discussion is particularly relevant in the context of European liberal arts bachelor's programmes, which recently re-emerged as an exception to the continental norm of specialized undergraduate curricula.…

This paper reviews studies on diversity in higher education institutions and suggests empirical approaches to measure diversity. "Diversity" in this paper refers to the internal and external differences among academic programs and institutions. As the empirical literature is relatively salient about how to measure diversity in higher…

Context: In the Dutch educational system, different learning pathways to higher professional bachelor (or HBO) programmes have been created: the regular VET route, the general secondary education route, and continuing learning pathways (such as the Green Lyceum or GL) that combine characteristics of these two traditional routes and that are…

Objective: To examine how student midwives in higher education learn to become competent and confident woman-centred practitioners. Design: Participant observation study using a 'buddy' approach. Setting: Bachelor of Midwifery students in one higher education institution in the Netherlands Methods: First-year student midwives followed one woman…

A cross-national comparison of degree programme levels became relevant when the borders of European countries opened for students and graduates, and higher education institutions were restructured into bachelor's and master's programmes. This new situation foregrounded the questions of what students are learning in the degree programmes of…