My fellow columnist Boudewijn van Dongen recently wrote about the numerus fixus circus at TU/e. His column even made it into parliamentary questions. I’ll save my opinion on that for a future column. What I want to discuss now is the analysis that comes before it. Before you can debate who gets in, you first have to ask who is even walking up to the door.

Back when I worked on TU/e’s information team, I saw this reflected in the poster listing all bachelor’s degree programs. All the programs were neatly lined up next to each other. Until you noticed the small asterisk next to some of them, meaning: intake restriction. For the university, a necessary disclaimer. For a high school student, it quickly feels like a warning sign. Selection. Testing. A chance you won’t make it through.

That has the opposite effect. Especially because the programs marked with an asterisk are often the ones with names that carry international appeal. Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science barely need explaining outside the Netherlands. You see them on the websites of American universities, Technische Universitäten, and just about every other institution that takes engineering seriously. Those labels have international export value.

Dutch study choice culture works differently from international study choice culture. A Dutch high school student does not choose based on status alone, but also on language, atmosphere, distance from home, and familiarity. Everyone here knows Werktuigbouwkunde. Mechanical Engineering is essentially the same program, but not every Dutch student automatically makes that connection. Internationally, however, that English name works precisely because Mechanical Engineering is a recognizable label there.

That creates a strange double effect. The program attracts many international students, gets an intake restriction, and becomes less of an obvious choice for Dutch high school students. At the same time, other interesting TU/e degree programs often have neither an internationally recognized label nor a name that immediately paints a picture for Dutch students.

And that is where crown prince little brother Delft comes out looking annoyingly good. There, Werktuigbouwkunde is still simply Werktuigbouwkunde: Dutch-language, recognizable, and without an intake restriction. Coincidence or not, Delft seems to do a better job of keeping its best-known programs aligned with Dutch study choice culture.

At TU/e, that feels less self-evident. The programs that are already easy to find internationally end up with the most selection barriers. Meanwhile, programs with less familiar names—but often plenty of potential—have to fight harder just to get noticed in the first place. Not because they are less interesting, but because they do not immediately speak for themselves to students who still need to discover what lies behind them.

That means the problem starts earlier than the selection procedure itself. We are really asking the question of who makes it through too soon. First, we should ask: who feels addressed at all?

Wob Knaap is a Data Science student at TU/e. The views expressed in this column are his own.

This column was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.