The annual Keuzegids Masters (Master’s University Guide) provides a quality comparison of every master’s program in the Netherlands. After all, with no fewer than 1,200 master’s programs in the Netherlands, the decision-making process for students can be quite difficult, according to the editors of the Keuzegids. Browsing through this year’s edition, it’s fair to say that TU/e’s master’s programs are of a high quality overall. When set against the master’s programs at TU/e Delft and the University of Twente in the comparison charts, Twente generally scores slightly better, whereas Delft is ranked just below Eindhoven.

The Keuzegids divided its assessment into the following criteria: program content, lecturers, testing and assessment, career preparations and atmosphere. The assessment is based on several sources, including student evaluation from last year’s National Student Survey (NSE) and labor market data from the Dutch Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA).

Best rated

As in previous years, Science and Technology of Nuclear Fusion is the highest rated TU/e program out of a total of 22 master’s programs. Six years ago, when the nuclear fusion program was ranked best in the NSE, professors Niek Lopes Cardoza and program director Roger Jaspers jokingly said that the success could perhaps be attributed to a chocolate bar.

Lopes Cardoza describes his program’s continued success in the ranking as “super cool. There are various developments taking place in this work field in particular, many of which are very relevant to our program. Private investors have been pouring billions of dollars in nuclear startups during the past year, which has created a fusion industry that hardly existed before. This opens up entirely new career perspectives for our students, and it strongly increases the need for our program, naturally.”

Student intake at the nuclear fusion master’s program has “increased linearly,” Lopes Cardoza says, and he expects intake numbers to climb to some forty students this year. The hundredth diploma was awarded in December. “Now, the challenge will be to maintain the quality of our education, and that will take more than lots of chocolate bars.”

Career preparation

The master’s programs Applied Physics, Automotive and Sustainable Energy Technology also score above average in several categories, and the program Systems & Control scores well in all five categories. Five master’s programs at TU/e were rated ‘substandard’ in the category ‘career preparation.’ That’s almost one quarter of all the programs assessed by the Keuzegids.

Professor Paul Koenraad, dean of the Graduate School, says that he is familiar with the fact “that we don’t pay enough attention to ‘career preparation,’ according to the students. We saw this before, in the results of the NSE, on which this year’s edition of the Keuzegids is based to a large extent. We definitely plan to focus on this issue more and to include it in the vision and actions of the Graduate School 2.0, which is currently being developed.”