Our star rating, explained

The Netherlands has no official government star rating for universities. Quality is checked differently: programmes are accredited by the NVAO (the Dutch-Flemish accreditation organisation), institutions and programmes appear in the DUO register, and student satisfaction is surveyed each year in the Nationale Studenten Enquête (NSE) and published on Studiekeuze123. Those are the independent Dutch instruments, and none of them is a star rating.

To make comparison easier, NetherlandsUniversities shows an editorial 1-to-6 star band. It is not a government score and not a separate judgement: it is a readable summary of our composite score, which is built from published figures: QS World position where one exists, programme breadth, the share of English-taught programmes and enrolment. Full weights are on our ranking methodology page. Because it measures breadth and scale, a small specialist institution can score low and still be excellent at what it does.

The six tiers

What the star rating reflects

• Breadth — how many recognised programmes the institution offers.
• English-taught share — how much of that is open to non-Dutch speakers.
• Scale — DUO enrolment counts.
• QS World position — only where the institution has one.

It does not measure teaching quality, graduate outcomes or student satisfaction.

How we use it

On NetherlandsUniversities, a university’s star rating appears on its profile as e.g. “Star rating 6/6 ★”. It is one signal in our ranking methodology, alongside QS World positions and other factors. Always confirm a programme’s accreditation with the NVAO and the university directly.