My son is in 5 VWO at a secondary school in Eindhoven and doesn't really know yet what he wants to study, although he is leaning towards Physics. Fortunately, he has a year and a half to explore what he wants to study. Time to visit open days and sign up for all kinds of walk-in activities.   

After some preliminary work, together with some classmates, he sighed that TU/e is not very open about its information activities. Since I know a bit about how “good” TU/e is at making websites, I sat down next to him. What turned out. He was absolutely right.   

To begin with, there is no information at all  before you enter a lot of personal information. My son did not get an answer to the simple question “what does the open day on October 5 look like?” without a profile.  

For that profile, TU/e really wants to know everything about you: email address, date of birth, gender, country of origin; all mandatory fields and for the purpose completely unnecessary information. I wonder if collecting so much data for an open day is justified.   

Once he got past the first step, he had to wrestle himself through a page where he had to put together a personal program for the day. I admire that he succeeded, because to make this as difficult as possible, the information is sorted by program, but each program follows a different time format, so you keep getting error messages about parts that overlap in time. Also, you have to be familiar with the Campus beforehand, so you know you can't get from the Blauwe Zaal to Flux in 0 minutes. Anyway, the perseverer wins and the only decision left to make is who will go with him that day, as TU/e has set a maximum of one companion.  

For many Dutch Gen-Z'ers, this is all a step too far. They will look at that website and think, “I'll go study somewhere else.” And I don't blame them. The fact that even the dean at his high school sighed during a parents' evening: “well, it's impossible to make agreements with the TU/e" does not help to attract more VWO students.  

Boudewijn van Dongen is a professor of Process Analytics at TU/e. The views expressed in this column are his own.