Sylhet Agricultural University

Sylhet Agricultural University (SAU) is a public university at Tilagor in Sylhet. It began functioning on 2 November 2006, after Parliament passed the Sylhet Agricultural University Act in October that year. Its stated mandate is to be a flagship institution for agricultural education, research and innovation.

Where it stands in the rankings

Ulkaa Edu Rank 2027 places SAU at position 30. The position is computed from the published Ulkaa methodology. In the QS Asia University Rankings 2026, SAU sits in the 801-850 band, which is the 26th position among Bangladeshi institutions in that table. No THE World 2027 entry is stored for it.

Quick facts

• Type: public university
• Location: Tilagor, Sylhet
• Established: 2006
• Students in 2023: 2,648, with 436 new admissions that year
• Research works in 2025: 429, with an h-index of 98 as of 2026

SAU is a specialist university. Almost everything it teaches relates to agriculture, animals, fisheries, biotechnology and the economics of farming.

SAU formally started on 2 November 2006. The Sylhet Agricultural University Act had been passed by Parliament a few weeks earlier, in October 2006.

The university was not built entirely from nothing. Its Faculty of Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences came from the upgrading of Sylhet Government Veterinary College, which was established in 1995 and had earlier operated as a School of Life Sciences under Shahjalal University.

The university's own account says it was founded to become the flagship university in agricultural education, research and innovation. It now has more than 250 international students, according to its website, and its research in aquatic science and in biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology has been ranked first in Bangladesh by SCImago (2023 for aquatic science and 2024 for the second field), as reported by the university.

Since 2019, undergraduate admission to SAU has gone through a cluster system. A single admission examination decides placement across nine agricultural universities, SAU included, and the university refers to it as the Agricultural Cluster (ACAS) system.

The university recorded 436 new admissions in 2023, so seats are limited. Postgraduate admission is handled separately, and applicants contact the relevant faculty directly.

For the current circular, eligibility and dates, check the official sites, http://www.sau.ac.bd for the university and the cluster admission site that the participating universities announce each year.

SAU has seven faculties and 47 departments according to public sources. Its own site lists the faculties as:

• Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences
• Agriculture
• Fisheries
• Agricultural Economics and Business Studies
• Agricultural Engineering and Technology
• Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering
• Postgraduate Studies

The university offers six undergraduate programmes and more than 50 postgraduate degrees, at master's and doctoral level. Ulkaa does not hold a programme list for SAU, so use the official site to confirm the exact degrees and their duration.

Research is one of its visible strengths. Ulkaa records 429 works in 2025 and 2,115 over the five years to 2025, with 17,827 citations in that window, and the share of papers with an international co-author was 52.5 percent in 2025. Those are public bibliographic figures, and they should be read as one indicator, since the number of works in a small specialist university can move a lot from year to year.

The campus at Tilagor is a temporary campus of about 55 acres. A permanent campus of about 200 acres is planned at Khadimnagar, so students should expect the facilities and location to change over time.

The university lists a central auditorium, residential halls, a central library, research laboratories and a healthcare centre among its facilities. About 3,000 students and more than 250 teachers make it a compact university, where most students belong to one of a few related fields.

Because the subjects are specialised, students share a common interest in farming, animals and fisheries, and practical work in laboratories and fields is a normal part of the week. Ask the university about hall seat availability and field placements for your own faculty.