Wageningen a world leader in agricultural science

QS World Universities Ranking puts Wageningen in second position among agricultural universities. Only UC Davis in the US has a better agricultural faculty. Wageningen’s environmental sciences are ranked tenth in the world. The British company QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) has been ranking the best universities since 2004, initially in partnership with The Times Higher Education. This year, QS presented a ranking of universities in the area of agriculture & forestry for the first time. Wageningen ended as number two, before a whole series of American universities including Cornell. QS bases the ranking on scores for reputation given by scientists and employers, the number of citations per article, teaching capacity and the extent to which the university is internationally oriented. Wageningen was among the top three agricultural universities a few years ago as well in a Taiwanese ranking, but the opinion of QS counts for more in the world of the ranking agencies. The QS ranking was a good advert for the Wageningen degree programmes Agricultural and Bio-resource Engineering and Environmental Sciences as Spits newspaper mistakenly interpreted the ranking as a list of degrees and other media copied this. ‘I haven’t found my degree in the ranking,’ says course director Jan Willem Hofstee of Agricultural and Bio-resource Engineering. ‘The score applies to all agricultural and food science subjects as a whole. But I felt no urgent need to put the media right.’