ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich is consistently the highest-ranked university for computer science in continental Europe, and one of the strongest in the world outside the United States and the United Kingdom. Founded in 1855 as Switzerland’s federal technical university, it combines the rigour of a European engineering school with the scale and ambition of a global research institution.

Its Department of Computer Science is broad and deep, with well-known strengths in systems, programming languages, machine learning, computer graphics and robotics. The university has a long record of foundational work: the Pascal and Oberon programming languages were created here by Niklaus Wirth, who won the Turing Award in 1984.

For students, ETH offers world-class research and teaching at the low tuition of a public Swiss university, which makes it unusually good value among the global elite. Admission and the degree itself are demanding, with a strong grounding in mathematics expected throughout.

Admissions

What it takes to get in depends heavily on where you went to school. Holders of a Swiss federal matura, along with a handful of qualifications ETH treats as equivalent such as the German Abitur, are admitted to the bachelor’s without an entrance exam. Applicants whose school-leaving certificate ETH does not recognise as equivalent must instead pass its own entrance examination in mathematics and further subjects, so international students should check how their qualification is treated before applying. One practical catch: the bachelor’s is taught in German and the exam is sat in German, so a C1 command of the language is expected before you arrive.