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Guide full of praise again for master’s programmes

Wageningen University continues to ‘lead the field’ in Master’s degrees in the Netherlands, concludes the Master’s Guide this week. Even so, the number of top Master’s programmes at Wageningen fell from 20 last year to 15 this year.
Albert Sikkema

Other Dutch universities are pleased to get two or three Master’s in the Higher Education Guide’s list of ‘top degree programmes’, but Wageningen has 15 such programmes this year. These are degree programmes that score 76 points or more based on students’ opinions and the national audit carried out by the accreditation organization NVAO. The Guide concludes that small-scale Master’s programmes offer better quality education than massive programmes. Three of Wageningen’s top programmes are in the national top 20. They are Geo-Information Science (88 points), International Land and Water Management (88 points) and Plant Sciences (84 points). The other top programmes at Wageningen are Leisure, Tourism and Environment, Development and Rural Innovation, Nutrition and Health, Forest and Nature Conservation, Biotechnology, Plant Biotechnology, Food Safety, Animal Sciences, Food Quality Management, Food Technology, Organic Agriculture, and Biosystems Engineering.

Last year, 20 of Wageningen’s 32 Master’s were designated top degree programmes. Bioinformatics, Earth and Environment, Environmental Sciences, Management, Economics and Consumer Studies, Molecular Life Sciences, and Urban Environmental Management were all awarded exactly 76 points last year but just fail to make the list of top programmes this year. On the other hand, Wageningen’s tourism degree programme improved its score. Five Wageningen Master’s programmes were not evaluated. Wageningen’s overall score was 67.5 points, much higher than that of other Dutch universities. ‘If you want to do a Master’s in nutrition, agriculture or fisheries, there’s only one place you can go in the Netherlands and that’s Wageningen. Many of these degree programmes are unique in the world and have an outstanding reputation,’ says the Guide

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