For many foreigners at TU Delft, the Dutch pension system isn’t very transparent or beneficial.In Holland, all civil servants belong to the private ABP (civil service) pension fund, and each month employers and employees pay significant sums of money into this fund.

Costly permitsLast week, the Immigration and Naturalization Office (IND) decided to raise the price of residence permits to 430 euros. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) seems to be aware that this steep price rise means that Holland is becoming a less attractive place for skilled and highly educated foreigners to live and work.

TU Delft works hard to attract highly educated foreigners, but new Dutch immigration laws make being a foreign TU student or staff member a real pain in the backside and the wallet.

Get out graduatesStudents who have graduated must move out of their student apartments when they have finished their studies, says Minister Kamp, of the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment.

Sports center gets half a millionThe Executive Board made a one-time-only 500,000 euro offer to the TU Delft Sports center. The money is to be used for optimizing the existing sports facilities.

An increasingly vocal group of academics say the Dutch professorial system needs to be reformed. The academic career path from post-doc, assitant/associate professor, to a full professorship is too unclear, demoralizing, and, in some areas, fundamentally unfair.

‘To improve the world, start with your own country’ is one of the propositions in Marjan Popov’s PhD thesis ‘Switching three-phase distribution transformers with a vacuum circuit breaker, Analysis of Overvoltages and the Protection of Equipment’, which he defended this week.

It may come as a bit of a surprise to foreign students or researchers, but yes, in Holland, there are student protests, too. This week, eight thousand students converged on Amsterdam to protest Dutch government plans to cut the higher education budget by 358 million euro over the next few years.

Professor Jakob de Swaan Arons, who reached professor emeritus status at TU Delft at age 65, embarks on a new career at China’s Tsinghua University.

Ghost Academy Terrifies Delft ProfessorEver wonder what it would be like to receive a membership letter from an organisation that may not even exist? Professor GuusBerkhout knows exactly how it feels.