Student - May 7, 2009

WU AND VHL EXPECT MORE FIRST YEARS

Preliminary registrations of first year Bachelor’s students for 2009/2010 at Wageningen University are up again – by fifteen percent on last year. A bigger surprise is the rise in registrations at Van Hall Larenstein – up by twenty percent.

Once again, Biology, Nutrition and health, and International development studies are the big draws at Wageningen University. Preliminary registration for the smaller course on International land and water management has also doubled, and 29 prospective students have signed up for it. There are now a total of 549 enrollments for Bachelor’s degree courses: 74 more than this time last year. Experience has shown that the figures at the beginning of May are a good predictor of the number of first years to be expected.

‘These are good figures. The trend that we get more students every year is carrying on’, says Edwin Kelhout of the Publicity and recruitment office. ‘I think we are doing well with tapping into the potential interest in our university. We publicize the socially relevant topics that Wageningen UR is working on, and we are transparent and honest about what the university has to offer students.’

Van Hall Larenstein has gone over to the same recruitment method as the university. A publicity campaign on the themes of climate change, urbanization and deforestation has been running since early 2008. This seems to be bearing fruit now, and VHL has 595 preliminary registrations, about 100 more than this time last year. This suggests that the University of applied sciences can expect twenty percent more first years next year. The biggest draw is Animal Management in Leeuwarden, with 162 registrations so far. In Velp, the course on Garden and landscape architecture attracts the most students. The smaller Wageningen VHL courses are all growing, especially Animal husbandry and management. Last year the preliminary registrations produced a big disappointment for VHL, and far fewer students turned up in September than were expected. This seemed to be the fault of the online registration system Studielink, which led to duplicate registrations. This has been fixed and the preliminary registrations are now a reasonably reliable indicator.