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Elsevier: Wageningen once again best Dutch university

Just like last year, Wageningen University has scored the highest in the ranking of weekly Elsevier. Eindhoven is the best university of technology, and Utrecht is leading among the six ‘broad’ universities.
Hoger Onderwijs Persbureau

© Elsevier

This week, the magazine publishes its annual investigation into the best study programmes in Dutch higher education, which is based on the National Student Survey (Nationale Studenten Enquête, NSE) that was carried out by Studiekeuze123.nl. In this survey, around 280 thousand students tell their experiences with their university and programme: whether they are satisfied, what they think of their lecturers, how they rate the facilities, etc.

Elsevier bases its ranking of institutions on a single question from the NSE: how satisfied are students about their programme in general? Universities with the most positively rated programmes achieve the highest scores.

To avoid comparing apples and oranges, the magazine makes a distinction between three categories: broad universities that offer a variety of disciplines, universities of technology and specialised universities.

Grand winner

The ‘specialised’ Wageningen University, that is surprisingly enough not seen as a university of technology by Elsevier, saw twelve of its nineteen programmes score positively. The remaining seven programmes were scored mediocrely by their students. In all, Wageningen is the overall winner, like last year.

Students of Eindhoven University of Technology are also very pleased with their university: half of the dozen programmes received a positive rating. With this score, Eindhoven leaves the other two universities of technology – Twente and Delft – far behind.

It is striking that the broad universities have by far the most programmes with an average score. Of the 45 programmes offered in Utrecht, 30 belong to this grey area. However, with eleven positive ratings, Utrecht University may still call itself the best broad university of the Netherlands.

UvA at the bottom

Closing the ranking is the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Students are dissatisfied with no less than one third of the 61 programmes, with only seven having scored above average.

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