This week the Algemeen Dagblad, a Dutch national newspaper, ran an article entitled ‘TU Eindhoven groans under the weight of its own success’. A journalist working on the paper spent a day on campus in preparation for writing a report on the consequences of the growth in student numbers. And so we have professor Erwin Kessels of the Department of Applied Physics, for example, cited as saying that his students are increasingly required to do experiments for which the outcome is already known, because there is too little capacity to allow everyone to experiment at will.

Over the past ten years the number of students has doubled to roughly 12,500. The number of enrolments by Dutch students is growing year on year by 5 to 10 percent. Retiring Board President Jan Mengelers says that in view of this he had wanted to impose a ceiling on student intake for all programs in order to guarantee the quality of a TU/e diploma.

Student fair

At the same time, TU/e's Facebook page has carried a posting this week about a student fair in Greece at which students and staff will be present in order to promote the university. The aim of this event, in all likelihood, will be to warm as many Greek students as possible to the idea of studying in Eindhoven.

These two news items nicely encapsulate the choice the Executive Board should have made some time ago: does the Executive Board want quality or quantity? It's all fine and dandy that new students are being recruited at a student fair in Greece; after all, it is good for the university's reputation and perhaps the next Bert Meijer or Maarten Steinbuch will be found ambling around the event.

But how does it benefit the current cohort of students? More than enough students enroll every year and students from the European Economic Area (EEA) pay the same amount of tuition fee as Dutch students. A new student recruited as a result of putting a representative on a plane to Greece brings in no more money than the new student whose enthusiasm for TU/e was fired by a presentation made at his or her high school 25 kilometers from Eindhoven in the town of Deurne.

In addition, the proportion of foreign students is already up to 20 percent. Mengelers states in the AD article that this proportion should not exceed 30 percent, because ‘it [TU/e] is and will remain a Dutch university’. Where this apparently arbitrary proportion has come from is left unsaid.

Above all else, this Dutch university should be an institution that trains as many Dutch school pupils as possible, as well as possible, to become engineers. Why, you say? Because the annual report 2017 states that more than 50 percent of the university's budget is provided by government funding. Only eight percent is acquired through tuition fees. The fact that government funding does not increase in line with student numbers is now also generally known. So having more students from the EEA does not raise income per student.

Quality or quantity

Hopefully the new Board President Robert-Jan Smits will act on this information as soon as he takes office. It is high time that priorities were set: does the university choose quality or quantity? By now everyone is convinced that the current rate of growth is untenable over the longer term.

Why then time and (very likely) money are being invested in a promotional trip to bring Greek students to Eindhoven when they are no more profitable than a Dutch student, is puzzling. Plenty of enrolments are received from both within the Netherlands and abroad. It would be better to invest that money in improving the education of current students; the student-staff ratio, for example, increased between 2010 and 2017 from 14:1 to 22:1. Tackling this can guarantee the quality of the diplomas. And experiments could once again be done at Applied Physics whose outcome is not known in advance.

Luc Tissingh | student of Electrical Engineering