It's a university of applied sciences, they have a very low confidence in their students' IT skills. Either that, or they lack the knowhow to create a LaTeX template. Honestly, probably both.

Theses have a certain set of requirements in the EU, like being archival-compatible and accessible. It's easiest to fulfill those guidelines if you just require people to use a Word template and tick certain boxes when exporting the PDF/A.

I ended up using LaTeX anyway in order to join the code examples as appendices. I had to separately prove that the document still passed all the requirements though. I didn't want to start pasting screenshots of code, as I find it unreadable. You get much better code formatting on LaTeX.

By requiring docx format in the end?