Four master programs at the Erasmus University can call themselves ‘top education’ for a year. They score highly in the Keuzegids Masters, which gives an overview of the quality of all masters in the Netherlands.
It concerns the masters Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts, International Management, Human Resource Management, and Molecular Medicine. These four masters belong, according to the Keuzegids, to the best educational programs in The Netherlands. Chinese Economy and Business, and Financial Law are two master programs at the EUR which score significantly below par. The other thirty EUR-masters which have been taken up by the Choice Guide are close to average and score comparably to the other master programs in their field.
Bad information supply
The editorial board of the Keuzegids warns that the information supply of master programs falls short gravely. Information about entry requirements, dropout rates, and costs is often unavailable or outdated. According to the Keuzegids, the flexibility of the bachelors-masters-system is hampered in practice. “At this time, only one of six university bachelors chooses a master outside of their own faculty. That is disappointing,” says editor in chief Frank Steenkamp. “But if you look at how institutions try to hold on to their own students, nobody needs to be amazed at this.”
Methodology
The Keuzegids Masters is published annually by the Centre for Higher Education Information (CHOI) and is meant to provide oversight of the quality of master educations to students who are choosing programs. Every master program gets appointed a score based on ratings by students and experts. The student ratings are from the National Students Survey of the past three years and provide an image of the content of the education, the quality of the teachers, the number of contact hours, the scientific personal development, focus on practice, communication towards students, and the facilities. Expert ratings are the scores from the accreditation decisions of the Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organization (NVAO). The editorial board of the Choice Guide has translated these decisions to ambition, level of the program, and the level of graduates. More about the methodology can be found here (only in Dutch). TF
