Agrarian School of Coimbra

The ESAC has a long history in vocational education and provision of services to the community started in the nineteenth century as the National School of Agriculture (1899), renamed the Regents School of Agriculture (1950), and finally in the 1970s, the Higher Agrarian School of Coimbra (Escola Superior Agrária de Coimbra), a state-run higher education school of agriculture. It was incorporated into the Polytechnical Institute of Coimbra in the 1980s but preserved wide technical, pedagogical and financial autonomy. It conferred the bacharelato degree and the Diploma de Estudos Especializados (DESE) diploma. In the late 1990s, after the upgrading of the Portuguese polytechnical institutions to bachelor's degree-conferring institutions (the Portuguese licenciatura), the differences between this polytechnical school and the university institutions were drastically reduced, an achievement that would fully materialize after the Bologna Process in 2006/2007. Currently, the ESAC awards a 3-year 1st cycle bachelor's degree (licenciatura); and a 2-year 2nd cycle masters' degree in several fields including biotechnology, food engineering, organic farming, and forest engineering. In addition, ESAC has developed and expanded its own research units and programs.