University of Groningen


The University of Groningen is a public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen, Netherlands. Founded in 1614, the university is the second oldest in the country.
The University of Groningen has eleven faculties, nine graduate schools, 27 research centres and institutes, and more than 175-degree programmes. The university's alumni and faculty include Johann Bernoulli, Aletta Jacobs, four Nobel Prize winners, nine Spinoza Prize winners, one Stevin Prize winner, various members of the Dutch royal family, several politicians, the first president of the European Central Bank, and a secretary general of NATO.

History

The institution was founded as a college in 1614 in an initiative taken by the Regional Assembly of the city of Groningen and the Ommelanden, or surrounding region. There were four faculties – Theology, Law, Medicine, and Philosophy.
The coat of arms of the university was confirmed by The Estates of the City and County of Groningen in 1615. It consists of the provincial arms, charged with an open book inscribed with the abbreviated words VER/BVM/DNI LV/CER/NA, short for Verbum Domini Lucerna Pedibus Nostris. The shield is surmounted by a golden crown of five leaves and four pearls.
In the first 75 years of its existence about 100 students enrolled every year. Almost half of the students and lecturers came from outside the Netherlands – the first rector magnificus, Ubbo Emmius, came from East Frisia in modern-day Germany, for instance – but at the same time there was already a close relationship between the university and the city and the surrounding region.
The development of the university came to a standstill at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century because of theological differences of opinion, a difficult relationship with the Regional Assembly and political problems that included the month-long siege of the city by the prince-bishop of Münster ‘Bommen Berend ’ in 1672 during which the university fielded a voluntary student company. On average two to three hundred students were registered with the university at any one time during this period.
During the French occupation between 1775 and 1814 the University of Groningen was administered by the Imperial University of Paris. Unlike Leiden University, it was not shut down and the institute was renamed Imperial University of Groningen. During this time period, it remained the only open university in the Kingdom of Holland. In 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, at the same time as Leiden and Utrecht, the university gained recognition as a national college of higher education, but this was followed by discussions about closure. The situation improved when a new main university building, the Academiegebouw, was constructed in 1850, a building that was largely financed by the people of Groningen. A fire completely destroyed the building in 1906.
In the meantime, the Higher Education Act of 1876 had radically improved the position of the university, which was renamed the "Rijksuniversiteit Groningen". Teaching took place in Dutch and Latin, and the university was given a research duty as well as an educational duty.
The University of Groningen developed during the first decades of the twentieth century. The number of faculties and courses grew steadily while the number of students grew rapidly. When the university celebrated its first 300 years in 1914 there were 611 registered students; this had grown to 1,000 by 1924. After a drop back during the Depression, and in particular during the Second World War, the number of students grew rapidly from 1945 to reach 20,000 in 1994. In recent times there are about 32,700 students registered at the University of Groningen with the number of foreign students again growing steadily, and following the tradition set by the first Rector Magnificus, the number of German students and researchers has grown strongly.
In March 2015, the RUG signed an agreement with the China Agricultural University to establish a campus in the Chinese city of Yantai. This would have made the RUG the first Dutch university to open a campus in China. The plan was heavily criticised, mainly due to worries about the restriction of academic freedom caused by censorship in China. In January 2018, the plans were cancelled by the Executive Board of the UG, based on the "insufficient support for the project".

Facts and figures

Key facts and figures about the University of Groningen are:
  • The university, as of 2025, has 33,000 students enrolled in various programs from the undergraduate level up to doctorate students. This includes 8,250 international students.
  • The university currently has 3,600 individuals in its academic staff. The UMCG included, a third of the academic staff is international.
  • 425 full professors
  • 45+ bachelor's degree programmes
  • 120+ master's degree programmes taught in English
  • 40+ research master's and top programmes
  • 11 faculties, nine graduate schools
  • 140,000 alumni
  • 120+ nationalities
  • 8,000 research publications
  • 4,350 PhD candidates
  • 1.0 billion EUR budget
  • Research grants from the Dutch Research Council : 14 starting grants, 5 experienced research grants and 4 senior research grants awarded in 2020
  • Research grants from the European Research Council : 1 Starting Grant, 1 Consolidator Grant, 3 Advanced Grants and 1 Proof of Concept Grant awarded in 2020
  • 18 patent applications in 2020
The university operates under the BSA system, under which a first year undergraduate student must achieve a certain number of ECTS in order to progress to the second year. This varies from 30 ECTS to 45 ECTS among various degrees.
RUG has its own newspaper: the .
The university's Center for Information Technology houses an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer and data center of Target used by the LOFAR project as well as a Virtual Reality and 3D-visualisation center.

Rankings and reputation

  • The University of Groningen is a member of the so-called Excellence Group of universities in Europe. The Excellence Group has 56 members, which is 1.3 percent of the approximately 4,500 European institutions of higher education.
  • RUG belongs to the top 100 large comprehensive research universities in the world.
  • RUG was #80 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2021.
  • According to the 2019 U.S. News & World Report, the Faculty of Economics and Business ranks as 3rd in the Netherlands, 10th in Europe and 32nd in the world for Economics and Business.
  • In 2021, the university ranked #64 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities. In addition to this overall score, the university falls within the global top 100 for several specific fields and subjects: Psychology, Clinical Medicine, Business Administration, Ecology.
  • RUG was ranked #139 worldwide in the QS WUR 2024.
  • The university was ranked #73 worldwide in 2019 by the National Taiwan University that publishes the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities.
  • The Webometrics placed the university #85 worldwide and #14 in Europe.
  • The university was ranked 3rd place in the UI GreenMetric World University Ranking in 2021, which includes 780 universities. UI GreenMetric World University Rankings was launched by Universitas Indonesia to focus awareness on sustainability in university policy-making. Universities are ranked in the basis of self-reported data in the areas of Setting and Infrastructure, Energy and Climate Change, Waste, Water, Transportation, and Education and Research.
  • From 2019 to 2020, the university was ranked 91st place in the Centre for World University Rankings.
  • In 2019, Times Higher Education introduced a new ranking: the Europe Teaching Rankings. The university was ranked 26th place, which includes more than 200 universities. This new ranking focusses on higher education institutions' teaching quality and learning environments for students.
  • The university was ranked 1st in the Netherlands by U-Multirank in 2019. UMR was developed by a consortium consisting of the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies in Twente, the Centre for Higher Education in Germany and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies in Leiden. The university achieved the highest score on 16 indicators that include International Orientation dimension, Research and Knowledge Transfer.
  • The Faculty of Economics and Business is accredited by both AACSB and EQUIS.

    Organisation

The RUG has 6,250 employees.
The university library was renovated between 2013 and 2017. The RUG has a branch in Leeuwarden. Plans to establish a "branch campus" in China's Yantai were called off in January 2018, and the University Museum is now in the process of being established.
The University of Groningen is represented in the Academic Heritage Foundation, a foundation that aims to preserve university collections and cultural treasures.

Faculties

The University of Groningen is organized in eleven faculties that offer programmes and courses in the fields of humanities, social sciences, law, economics and business, spatial sciences, life sciences, and natural sciences and technology. Each faculty is a formal grouping of academic degree programmes, schools and institutes, discipline areas, research centres, and/or any combination of these drawn together for educational purposes. Each faculty offers bachelor's, master's, PhD, and exchange programmes, while some also offer short certificate courses.
Since 2014, the RUG also has a partly independent liberal arts college, University College Groningen.