FeatureFaced with an unprecedented influx of international students, mainly from France, one of Europe's top engineering schools, moved to tighten its admission requirements for 2025.
Lausanne's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) is buckling under the strain of its student population. Located on the northern shore of Lake Geneva at the foot of the Alps, the massive campus of over 500,000 square meters, with its 80 buildings, is now looking for more space. The school's management decided on Tuesday, April 16, to cap the number of first-year bachelor students for the start of the 2025 academic year at 3,000, around 200 less than in previous years.
The decision is meant to guarantee the "quality of studies" at a school "saturated" with students. As a result, the elite school will give preferential access to holders of a maturité, a Swiss high school diploma, at the expense of international students, the vast majority of whom are French. "We are always strangers to someone," wrote the poet Tahar Ben Jelloun in Racism Explained to My Daughter (Seuil, 1998)...
One of Switzerland's top engineering schools is following in the footsteps of Belgium, where faced with an influx of young international students, some universities introduced maximum quotas for a few of the most popular degrees in 2006. French students' exile to foreign institutions after their high school diploma, the baccalaureate, was highlighted in a 2023 report by Campus France, the national agency responsible for promoting French higher education abroad. It revealed an increase of 25% in five years, with 108,654 young French students present worldwide, mainly in Canada, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, Spain and Germany.
Surging popularity
EPFL's student population has been rising steadily. The school had over 7,000 students in 2010, almost 11,000 in 2019 and 13,445 by the start of the 2023 academic year. In 2010, 851 first-year students had Swiss maturité diplomas, and 360 came from abroad, including 316 from France. In 2023, there will be 1,088 Swiss maturité holders and 1,198 international students, including 1,050 French baccalaureate holders. In 13 years, the number of students with a Swiss maturité thus rose by 28%, while the number of those admitted with a foreign diploma jumped by 233%, according to figures communicated by the school, "90% of them [come] from France," said the school's management.
Lausanne's engineering school isn't the only one attracting French high school students to Swiss higher education. Every institution in French-speaking Switzerland counts a large number of French students in their ranks: 474 joined the University of Geneva at the start of the 2023 academic year, while the University of Lausanne has 1,392 French students for the 2023-2024 academic year. When questioned, the Swiss Federal Statistical Office revealed that the country had exactly 5,808 French students in 2013 and 7,498 in 2018. In 2021, Campus France estimated that over 12,000 French people were studying in the Swiss Confederation.
