"Take a walk across the campus and it is immediately evident that everywhere is quite a bit busier than in previous years." For Board President Jan Mengelers, the cause of the decline in the Keuzegids is clear. "A doubling in the number of students in seven years has put such a strain on the education system that it was only a matter of time before we saw consequences. An upper limit on student intake for almost all our programs should help us regain control of the situation."

TU/e has dropped in the ranking from third to seventh place. There have been complaints about program manageability and facilities. The compilers of the Keuzegids believe the decline is attributable not only to TU/e's strong growth, but also to its university-wide renewal of curricula. In spite of this, three programs still managed to merit the label 'top program': Applied Mathematics (scored 80 on a scale of 100), Chemical Engineering and Chemistry (78) and Applied Physics (76).

Architecture, Building and Planning (46) and Industrial Design (54) are the programs that gained the lowest scores. Their testing, lecturers, supervision and academic training gained poor assessments. According to Rector Magnificus Frank Baaijens, ID has just completed a major overhaul of its curriculum, "so it is not odd that some dissatisfaction has arisen. The poor performance of Architecture is an issue we will be examining closely."

Not that TU/e is alone. Other rapidly expanding universities have also taken a battering in the rankings of the Keuzegids. Wageningen University is the only university that is combining substantial growth with sustained quality. For more than ten years, the ‘green’ university has been the clear winner.

This is the first time that the Keuzegids has looked at the universities' internationalization and English-taught education. More so than elsewhere, at the universities of technology things are not yet running smoothly; that is the conclusion. In particular, the lecturers' poor command of English sometimes comes as an unpleasant surprise to students. At TU/e and the University of Twente lecturers earned a 6.3 rating for their English. Colleagues in Maastricht, Groningen and Tilburg speak the language more fluently: they score almost a full point higher.

The Keuzegids Universiteiten is published every year to help prospective Bachelor's students choose a degree program. Student opinions, taken from the National Student Survey, the opinions of experts, and figures on dropouts and teaching hours are all taken into account.