Other than surfing, work has been an interesting experience because the difference between the Netherlands and the US in terms of the education system and work culture is becoming very noticeable. I currently work for a start-up with 140 mostly American employees with an average employee age of around 25-30 and I’m starting to notice how different my background and experiences are from my colleagues.

Let’s start with education, why on earth it feels so common to get a master’s in the Netherlands compared to the USA, and well… the rest of the world.

Masters vs. Bachelor

In my bubble in the Netherlands, most students that do a bachelor’s will pursue a master’s degree immediately after their bachelor's. They also won’t complete it in the nominal time allocated, such that for a 3-year mechanical engineering program, less than 30% complete the degree in 3 years and the average student takes 4.5 years. As a result, students graduate around the age of 24-26.

My experience in the US so far has been that most people I’ve met haven’t completed a master’s and actually started working right out of their undergrad (the American word for bachelor's degree). People here also tend to actually complete their studies in the allocated time and it’s very uncommon to extend your studies unless you properly “defer” for a semester or two. In the US, you don’t even need a master’s degree to pursue a PhD, you can start one right after your bachelor’s.

As for people studying in the rest of the world, it seems that most of them don’t have a master’s degree either. This is based on my friends from high school in Shanghai who ended up studying all over the globe (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, Australia, Singapore, South Africa and so on.) and the international students I’ve met in Delft and while on exchange. The ones that do, most often work for a while before deciding which masters they want to do and where.

Why master?

This made me wonder why it seems so normal to get a masters in the Netherlands, to the extent that many companies include a master’s degree as a requisite. For the rest of the world, a bachelor’s is often sufficient for any job that requires a form of higher education and in contrast, they often require more years of work experience.

For Dutch (and European) students, studying is relatively cheap. We have low tuition fees, accessible funding and flexible degree programs that make it easy to take on extracurriculars (just as a part-time job to accommodate the costs of studying). For others, such as Americans, studying costs a fortune. Perhaps, for this reason, it’s more common for them to see studying as a serious investment, so the decision to pursue a master’s is not taken lightly and needs to add value to their career path.

What this means is that if you take a 24-26 year old Dutch person, they will have just graduated with a bachelor's and master’s degree (or two), possibly with some work experience, a few internships, committee work, board year or volunteering. In contrast, many of my 24-26 year old American colleagues will have graduated from their undergrad at 21 or 22 and have about 2-4 years of work experience. They might decide to pursue a master’s when they’re 30 and have a better idea of what they want to do.

It seems a bit as though we take getting a degree in the Netherlands for granted sometimes, but being in the US has really made me think twice. Why do recruiters in the Netherlands seem to value a master’s more than other places and is getting a master’s degree better than work experience, what is the difference?