Switzerland's 'Poly' could not award doctorates until 1909, yet trained Einstein
ETH Zurich opened in 1855 as a federal polytechnic school, and locals still call it the Poly. It only gained the right to grant doctorates after reforms between 1905 and 1908. Today it counts 22 Nobel laureates among its affiliates, Albert Einstein the most famous, and ranks among the world's top ten universities.
The Swiss Confederation founded it on 7 February 1854 amid a political fight: liberals wanted a national university, while conservatives insisted higher education stay with the cantons, fearing a boost to liberal power. The compromise was a federal technical school, run directly by the national government. Lectures began on 16 October 1855 in scattered buildings, including space shared with the University of Zurich, across six faculties from architecture and forestry to chemistry.
Its main building, raised between 1858 and 1864, was designed by Gottfried Semper, then professor of architecture at the school and one of the leading architectural theorists of his era, who also gave his name to Dresden's Semperoper. His neoclassical design borrowed rusticated lower storeys and giant columns from Palladio and Bramante. For decades the University of Zurich occupied its south wing, until that university completed its own headquarters in 1914; around then Semper's building gained its cupola.
Under president Jerome Franel the institution reshaped itself into a university; the first doctorates followed in 1909, and in 1911 it took its present name. It now enrols 26,942 students, 4,266 of them doctoral candidates who are hired as paid lab employees. First-year students face the Basisprufungen, intensive foundation exams in mathematics and physics that must be passed within two attempts; failure rates in maths-heavy programmes often reach 50% to 60%. Tuition stays low thanks to federal subsidy, at 730 francs a semester, though fees for foreign students tripled in 2025.
Research reach is wide. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, part of ETH, switched on the Alps machine in 2024 with more than 10,000 Nvidia H100 processors. Its AI centre runs Apertus, an open language model trained across over 1,000 languages, including Swiss German and Romansh. As of 2022 the school had spun off 527 companies, and physicist Didier Queloz, its latest Nobel laureate, won in 2019.
Source: ETH Zurich
