Long hailed for its excellence, Swiss higher education now has to deal with the consequences of its own success: too many students, too much competition and not enough resources. Growth, international competition, the AI revolution and funding: four fronts are opening at once, and none will close on its own.
Switzerland has a university system that ranks among the best in the world. Its cantonal universities, universities of applied sciences and, at the forefront of scientific research, EPFL and ETH Zurich enjoy a firmly established reputation on the international stage. Yet this success offers no guarantee for the future: in the years ahead, Swiss higher education institutions will face a fundamental question, namely how to preserve excellence while responding to rising demand for education, accelerating technological change and increasingly intense global competition.
The first challenge is growth. Swiss higher education institutions themselves stress the need to maintain the quality of teaching and research while accounting for demographic trends, globalisation and economic and technological shifts. In its strategic objectives for 2025-2028, swissuniversities places particular emphasis on international excellence, innovation, equal opportunities and the contribution of higher education institutions to society and the Swiss economy. EPFL illustrates this tension especially clearly: since the start of the 2025 academic year, the school has capped the number of new first-year bachelor’s students at 3,000, a measure set to remain in place for at least four years. Holders of a Swiss gymnasium Matura continue to be admitted without restriction, while foreign candidates are now selected according to available places. This reflects a simple reality: an institution can become a victim of its own success when its intake capacity no longer grows at the same pace as demand. The observation extends far beyond EPFL. For a research university, growth does not simply mean opening more lecture halls: it requires laboratories, digital infrastructure, researchers, housing, funding and sufficient capacity to supervise students. Academic excellence is therefore, above all, a matter of capacity.
The second challenge is international competition. Switzerland cannot take its model for granted: researchers, students and investment circulate globally, and the United States, Europe and now Asian powers are devoting substantial resources to research and strategic technologies. In this context, Switzerland’s readmission to Horizon Europe marks a significant step forward. Since the agreement signed between Bern and Brussels in November 2025, Swiss researchers and innovators have once again been able to take part, with retroactive effect from 1 January 2025, in calls under Horizon Europe, Euratom and Digital Europe. The opening strengthens scientific cooperation and funding opportunities, but it also exposes Swiss institutions more directly to the competition it is meant to offset. Added to this is a third front, technological: artificial intelligence is already transforming research, teaching and certain university work practices, and both EPFL and ETH Zurich have chosen not to remain on the sidelines. Together with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), they developed Apertus, a multilingual, fully open language model unveiled in September 2025 as the first large model of its kind designed in Switzerland. The issue, however, goes beyond producing more technology: it is about defining what the university should become in a world where some knowledge is instantly accessible and where artificial intelligence can generate text, code or analysis. Higher education institutions will probably need to give greater weight to reasoning, source verification, experimentation, scientific creativity and interdisciplinarity. ETH Zurich has explicitly set this reflection on a long-term course through institutional priorities spanning 2025-2036, aimed at defining what a leading university should be ten or twenty years from now.
Finally, there is the issue of funding. For the 2025-2028 period, the Confederation has set the appropriations allocated to education, research and innovation, notably for the ETH domain and cantonal higher education institutions; the Swiss National Science Foundation alone may receive up to CHF 4.9 billion over this period. This ceiling remains subject to budgetary trade-offs, however. Several savings measures discussed in autumn 2025 could reduce these amounts as early as 2026, a reminder that Swiss academic ambitions remain dependent on political choices at any given moment. The future of Swiss universities is therefore not just a race for international rankings: their real challenge will be to maintain a balance between openness and intake capacity, excellence and accessibility, autonomy and public responsibility, basic research and innovation, international competition and cooperation.
How far can excellence be pushed before the balances that make it possible begin to weaken? Switzerland still has considerable assets, but its university model will now have to prove that it can not only be excellent, but remain so over the long term.
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