Students edition
This week: why fewer students are choosing IT right now, what that means for your chances, and which tools make smarter studying easier.
Over 20 percent fewer IT students: that's your chance
Now that AI makes programming easier, fewer people choose an IT degree. But the Netherlands wants more IT workers, not fewer.
The number of new IT students at Dutch universities has dropped by more than twenty percent, compared with 2022. That's according to figures from university association UNL. 2022 was also the year ChatGPT was launched. The likely reason: with good prompts, you can already program fairly well, so the degree seems less necessary. Experts say the opposite is true. The Netherlands needs more IT workers, partly to become less dependent on American tech companies like Microsoft and Google.
Background for subscribersChoose IT, and you'll soon have fewer fellow students and probably a better chance of a job, because the Netherlands urgently needs more IT workers. If you use AI tools for your studies, be careful: made-up sources count as fraud, even if you didn't mean to. So always check that a source really exists and is accurate. And keep in mind that opinion pieces in newspapers are sometimes written by AI: handy to know if you use them as a source.
Made-up AI sources still count as fraud, even without intent
The Council of State confirms that sources which don't exist, or say something different from what you claim, count as fraud. That's true even if an AI tool invented them and you meant no harm. The exam board doesn't need to prove you did it on purpose.
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