In October, ETH Zurich, Switzerland’s top technical university, tightened its admissions criteria for masters and PhD programs in certain science and technology fields. It justified the move as complying with Swiss laws to counter international espionage.
The change will affect applicants from internationally sanctioned countries, including Iran, Afghanistan and Russia. Most impacted, however, will be Chinese nationals. According to ETH Zurich, it has enrolled more than 1,300 Chinese students since 2023 — twice as many as in 2018.
While the ETH is for now an outlier in Switzerland — the University of Zurich, whose main building is next to ETH’s, has not adopted comparable policies — the decision has shone a spotlight on how universities in the German-speaking world are attempting to balance national security concerns with academia’s imperative to pursue open scholarship and collaboration across borders.
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