Signals of excellence or indifference? Dutch employers' perceptions of liberal arts bachelor's degrees

Abstract

This paper investigates how Dutch employers perceive university college bachelor's degrees. These programmes were introduced as part of an excellence initiative in Dutch higher education, offering broad, interdisciplinary, and selective undergraduate degrees in liberal arts and sciences. By conducting semi-structured interviews with 20 recruiters based in the Netherlands, the study explores the graduate job selection process, examining the relative importance of different factors in employers' decisions and the signals sent by university college degrees to employers. The findings reveal that the signalling effect associated with university college degrees is either entirely absent or neutral. Dutch employers demonstrate limited familiarity with university colleges and tend to assign less significance to the bachelor's degree when it is accompanied by a master's degree in a relevant field. This underscores the challenge of integrating innovative educational models into the traditionally egalitarian research university segment of Dutch higher education