Elite Swiss university plans to limit places for foreign students
The Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) is planning to introduce a limit of 3,000 places for first-year bachelor's degrees from 2025.
The entry limit is scheduled to last for four years and is potentially renewable. It would affect students with foreign high school leaving certificates wanting to apply to EPFL. A consultation has been launched.
“Thanks to its teaching and research excellence, EPFL has become a university of choice, especially for high-school graduates in other countries. However, the growing size of our student body is putting a strain on the quality of the education we can provide,” stated a press release on Monday.
More
How easy is it for foreign students to study in Swiss universities?
All graduates with a Swiss school leaving certificate (Maturité) would be admitted without restriction, as required by law, as would those repeating their first year. Any places remaining would then be allocated to applicants with foreign high school leaving certificates, ranked in descending order of their secondary school leaving grades.
In twelve years, the number of students has more than doubled: from 5,283 bachelor’s and master’s students in 2010, the EPFL welcomed 10,894 in 2023.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.