Dutch government mulls random selection for university courses

Different models under review for oversubscribed courses, with opinion split over fairness of exclusion thresholds

MPs in the Netherlands have debated the introduction of random selection to fill places on oversubscribed university courses—a system that was previously banned for being too arbitrary.

The Dutch government has issued a bill proposal that would involve drawing prospective students at random from a pool of qualifying applicants. The cabinet said it would be up to universities and individual courses whether to make this an unweighted or a weighted draw.