[coliveira]

In many universities the problem is that you need to produce a thesis according to the university specifications. A generic thesis document may help with this, but will unfortunately never solve the complete problem. Fortunately, however, most universities also have a local LaTeX guru, or you can just copy the style used by previous students.

[snowballsteve]

Where I did mine, they required submissions in strict word formatting.

[reagency]

What's going to happen whem Word is dead is 20 years and they have all these useless files?

[tonyarkles]

There's a very good chance that they'll end up being transformed into PDFs before being released, and will also end up in print.