Banking on Students. A political economy analysis of the agency of the Dutch state through the toughening of conditions for leenstelsel-student
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2024-06-24
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en
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In 2015 the Dutch government eliminated a subsidy-based system in favour of the leenstelsel, a loan-based financing system through which students could borrow money from the government to finance their education costs. Before the introduction was promised that the conditions of this loan would be very amene and would have low consequences on the financial impact of the borrowers, leading to its dubbing as sociaal (social) leenstelsel. Yet, after a new coalition was formed in 2017, the Dutch government changed the rules of the system and the social element of the leenstelsel would become open for reinterpretation. The interest rates of the loan would be altered, pledged reinvestments would only materialise for a third and, despite a loan registry exemption, banks would be given preferential treatment over students when it came to the weight of leenstelsel-debt on their credit rating affecting their homeownership chances. Through a regulationist approach, this thesis seeks to provide an answer to why this came to be within the context of the increasing financialisation of the Netherlands, whilst expanding the approach by including a retheorisation of state agency. Through factors that hold insightful information for the determination of state agency, like a discursive analysis of the discourses of political parties that comprised the government coalition and their motivations to enact certain policies, a lower reliance on structural assumptions makes place for different, yet, relevant ontologies on a lower level of abstraction which help to avoid reductionism, as they reveal the processes through which political parties have contributed to the internalisation process of financialisation in the Netherlands, ultimately leading to the government agency that this thesis is concerned with.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen