When students Marc Gruener and Micha Brugger got frustrated with module registration, they built an app to fix it in five weeks.
Within months, half the university was using it. Then the SU bought it from them. Now the university’s official website tells all students to use it and directs support queries to the SU.
They weren’t startup prodigies. Just students with time, space, and an institution that took them seriously.
This morning we’re in St. Gallen – a compact Swiss city where the university spills down a hillside and the SU has been operating since 1921. Later we’ll head to ETH Zurich, the federal technical university, where the model is different but the underlying logic is the same – students aren’t just represented, they’re resourced to deliver solutions themselves.
We’re here kicking off the Wonkhe SUs Rhineland study tour – 35 SU officers and staff from across the UK are spending a week visiting student organisations in Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. We’re already tired, we’re overspending on coffee, and our attempts at German keep getting answered in flawless English. But we’re learning.
What do points make?
First, some context. When demand exceeds supply for popular modules – and it always does – universities need some mechanism to allocate places.
In the UK, this is usually first-come-first-served – the registration portal opens at 9am, everyone scrambles, and your timetable depends on whether you happened to be at your laptop with a decent internet connection at the right moment.
It rewards speed and luck, not preference or need. Students with jobs, caring responsibilities, or just slower wifi lose out.
Some UK universities weight allocation by programme requirements or year of study. A few use random ballots. But the fundamental logic is reactive – places go to whoever gets there first, or whoever the algorithm prioritises. The Swiss do something different – they run an auction.
At the University of St. Gallen – HSG to locals – course places are allocated through a bidding system. Each semester, every student receives 1000 points to allocate across the courses they want. Places go to the highest bidders. It forces you to prioritise consciously – stake 200 points on an oversubscribed strategy module, and you have less for everything else.
It’s fairer than first-come-first-served – but it’s also complicated. HSG’s version runs across multiple rounds over several weeks. The information needed to bid well is scattered across multiple university websites. Students developed elaborate spreadsheets and frantic WhatsApp groups trading intelligence on what’s oversubscribed.
The bidding process is complicated and time-consuming… Neither of us were in the mood for it any more.
Enter Biddit.
The two masters students built it in summer 2021 – a React app that pulls course data together, automatically detects timetable clashes (when the module will run is helpfully set in advance), and lets you plan hypothetical timetables before committing points. They contacted a Computer Sciences professor, who connected them to IT services, who gave them access to the official API endpoints – the same data feeds powering the university’s own systems.
We made a conscious decision not to make money with Biddit,
…Marc told the university magazine:
The HSG student in you briefly asks how you can monetise it – but the goal was never to make money out of students.
When they were about to graduate, they sold the app to SHSG – the SU. Now it’s maintained by the SU’s IT team, integrated with SHSG’s infrastructure, and recommended on the university’s official study planning pages.
Post-acquisition, they added course ratings – nearly 10,000 ratings and 1,000 comments across 2,500 courses, finally answering the question official course descriptions never do:
Is this actually good?
The university, asked about the app, responded positively. They’ve since invited the Biddit founders onto the project team redesigning the official bidding system. Students identifying gaps, building solutions, and then co-authoring institutional change.
HSG doesn’t just tolerate this. The university website has a dedicated section celebrating this sort of student engagement – front and centre under “university”. The St. Gallen Symposium (which we’ve written about before), START Summit (Europe’s largest student-run conference for entrepreneurship and technology), the 130+ clubs and initiatives – all are showcased as part of what makes HSG distinctive. The institutional framing goes like this:
Our understanding of student engagement goes far beyond mere participation; it encompasses initiative, creativity and social responsibility. We are proud to create an environment in which students can realise their ideas, thereby strengthening trust in our institution and bringing their positive impact to society.
Rather than the SU writing about itself, it’s the university writing about student leadership as institutional infrastructure.
The investment goes both ways. HSG runs a formal Mentoring Programme – volunteer mentor graduates paired with students at Bachelor, Master and PhD level for two years of individual support when transitioning through their course and into the labour market. We’ve written before about HSG’s astonishing Start Week, delivering academic and group social induction through a one week, one credit challenge project – that’s run by students. They’re examples of the way in which the university and its SU build scaffolds and structures around student development, not just permitting students to build their own.
Apps and atoms
Biddit isn’t the only student-built digital infrastructure here. SHSG’s Campus App – launched by a vice president in 2020 – shows real-time seat availability in study rooms, bus and train times, the mensa (ie university restaurant) menu, news and events from 130+ clubs, a marketplace for buying and selling, room bookings, library searches, student deals, and integration with Compass, the university’s official student records system. Students even check their grades through the SU app.
SHSG also has a raft of physical infrastructure through something called the Infrastructure Initiative.
Walk around both the campus and the city of St. Gallen and you’ll find SU properties scattered. theCO is a student-run co-working space in the city centre. theHUB is an entrepreneurship centre near the station. theOFFICE is a complex of offices for student clubs on campus. theSTAGE is an event venue. All managed by students, all part of SHSG’s infrastructure portfolio. More on the site here.
Behind all of this sits a fascinating “staffing” structure in the SU – a six-person executive board, around 50 people in the core SHSG operation, and another 200-250 across the various initiatives. The annual budget is roughly 500,000 CHF – about £440,000 – with 75,000 CHF for events alone. Corporate partners include PwC, KPMG, and UBS.
Almost none of these people are permanent paid employees, and very few are paid at all – at least not in money. The apps, the bars, the co-working spaces, the events, support for 130+ clubs, representation on university committees – all of it runs on student volunteering.
Each board member has a Chief of Staff – a student who supports them across all their responsibilities. Below them sit “teamies” – students assigned to specific projects. Finance has a Chief of Staff and teamies handling accounting, controlling, and corporate relations. Events, Campus Culture and Sustainability has a Chief of Staff and six teamies. Marketing has a Chief of Staff and a team handling Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, the newsletter, and app content.
It’s a real organisational structure. New teamies get an Introduction Weekend with workshops and skills training, and each person gets assigned something they can own.
But almost nobody is paid. The model runs on “campus credits” – a formal category of ECTS credits awarded for “extraordinary achievements attained by students in the interest of the University as a whole”. Proper SU work that serves other students counts as academic learning.
The system is rigorous. One campus credit requires at least 90 hours of work – three times the standard 30 hours per course credit. At Bachelor level, the minimum project is 4 credits (360 hours); at Master’s, 3 credits (270 hours). The credits sit within “Contextual Studies (Skills)” – a formal part of HSG’s curriculum that makes up a full 25 per cent of every student’s degree.
To qualify, the work must be a defined project with specific responsibility – not just general club membership. You need a supervising faculty member, progress reports, and a final report. Approval is decided by the Dean of Studies with advice from a Campus Credits Committee that includes the SU president.
Expenses and symbolic compensation are allowed, but the project must be unpaid. This sounds like UK volunteering culture – but the difference is that it counts. The hours translate into degree credits, formally recognised and documented on your transcript.
In other words, at HSG student leadership isn’t spare-time volunteerism that happens despite your degree. It’s part of the degree.
In the background
After St. Gallen, we boarded our bus to Zurich. ETH is a different beast – a federal university, directly funded by the Swiss government, with 26,000 students and a budget that makes tuition fees almost irrelevant (730 CHF per semester for Swiss students, about 2 per cent of institutional income) despite a big debate about them being increased.
VSETH, the student association, has 16,000 members – participation is voluntary, though a 32 CHF fee covers basic representation for everyone. But the scale matters less than the structure.
There are 17 Fachvereine – study associations, one for each department,and they’re the absolute core of the organisation. You’re automatically assigned to yours when you enrol. They do both representation AND activities. The same organisation that runs your department’s bar nights also negotiates with your professors about curriculum.
In the UK, we’ve historically separated these functions. At ETH, the Fachverein is your first point of contact for everything – academic problems, social events, peer support, professional networking. They run between 10 and 170 events per year each. They have seats on departmental committees – the Teaching Commission, departmental conferences, curriculum reviews. They’re how students and the institution stay connected.
The scale of service provision is ambitious. Fachvereine run their own orientation programmes, produce exam archives, organise study trips abroad, host company presentations, manage mentoring schemes for first-years. Some publish their own magazines. Some run shops selling branded merchandise and course materials. They’re providing services that in the UK might come from the university, or from the central SU, or not at all.
And then there’s careers. ETH has a Career Center – university-run, offering coaching, CV checks, job platforms. But the actual recruiting fairs? Students run those.
Polymesse is the big one – a three-day fair with 140+ companies, over 10,000 student visitors, run by Forum&Contact, a VSETH committee. A large group of students organise the whole thing, and it’s one of the largest recruiting events in Switzerland.
The Fachvereine run their own too. VIS (computer science) runs Kontaktparty – about 100 companies, over 1,000 visitors, billed as the largest academic IT recruiting fair in Switzerland. AMIV (mechanical and electrical engineering) runs AMIV Kontakt. VMP (maths and physics) runs MindPhair. Each department has careers infrastructure organised by students, on top of what VSETH provides centrally.
“We keep us the background,” VSETH’s talented President Clemens Walter tells us. During orientation, it’s the Fachvereine who run campus tours and distribute welcome bags. The central body provides infrastructure and coordination, but the real action happens at department level.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether the VSETH brand even matters. Students identify with their Fachverein first – that’s where the community is, where the events happen, where representation feels personal and where community counts. VSETH is the federal structure that makes coordination possible, but it’s not the thing students love. The question is whether that’s a problem or a feature.
The structure then scales upward for representation. Fachvereine send delegates to the Fachvereinsrat – a council where all 17 associations discuss VSETH-wide political issues and scrutinise the executive. VSETH holds seats on ETH-level bodies – the Hochschulversammlung (university assembly), the Teaching Commission, the Gastro Commission. At St. Gallen, the Student Parliament elects representatives directly to university management committees, including the Senate, where six of 32 seats belong to students and doctoral candidates.
This is partly the “school plays sell out” theory in action, and partly compilation album stuff. VSETH is the spine, the distribution, the infrastructure that makes the whole thing hang together. The Fachvereine provide the hits. VSETH runs Polymesse, coordinates the fee protests, negotiates the 3,000 square metres of space. The Fachvereine run Kontaktparty and MindPhair and AMIV Kontakt, host the bars at ESF, deliver the orientation tours.
Designing interventions
VSETH’s work isn’t just about events and representation. Here students are designing and running their own access and participation interventions too.
Its “Focus Groups” initiative started as a pilot in autumn 2021. The problem – students arrive at ETH with vastly different levels of prior knowledge. Some sailed through advanced maths at gymnasium (the academic secondary school track in Switzerland) – others are first-generation students who got less preparation. In regular exercise classes – small-group problem sessions, like tutorials – this heterogeneity creates problems. Students with less background don’t dare ask questions. Teaching assistants can’t pitch the content right for everyone. Early negative experiences compound into dropout rates.
Focus groups are a solution designed by students, implemented by students, and now winning awards. They’re exercise classes specifically for students who self-assess as having less prior knowledge. The TAs spend more time on essential basics, and students know what they’re signing up for. No additional resources required – just a reallocation of existing tutorial capacity.
The pilot had two focus groups in Physics I for first-year Maths and Physics students. The results – 79.6 per cent of focus group participants passed the exam, compared to 70.6 per cent for the whole cohort. Women made up 52.5 per cent of focus group participants – far higher than the course average.
By autumn 2022, there were 10 focus groups across four departments. By 2023, there were 16. It’s all some distance from an SU asking to be properly consulted on a university’s APP.
5,000 visitors and pre-mixed cocktails
The events here operate at a scale too. ESF – the first-semester party – draws 5,000 visitors. Three hundred student helpers contribute 1,500 hours of work. For safety, all cocktails are pre-mixed to standardised alcohol content. The Fachvereine host individual bars, each with real profit-and-loss responsibility. It’s commercial experience for students, revenue for the association, and distributed risk across the organisation.
Polymesse – the careers fair mentioned earlier – has 130 student helpers paid 26 CHF per hour. The event generates actual profit, which funds everything else VSETH does. It’s student-organised, professionally executed, financially sustainable.
Then there’s Nik’s Hutte – a three-week Christmas market and bar where associations host evening shifts, and Conquering is a 1st May rally with costumes, teams and checkpoints through the city. It’s all run by students, because students have been given the time, training, and trust to do it properly.
To help facilitate, VSETH has 3,000 square metres of guaranteed space on the ETH campus. It’s not negotiated annually, nor dependent on good relationships with estates, and not subject to the next cost-cutting exercise – but guaranteed.
The story goes that VSETH once gifted a building to ETH. In exchange, they secured a contract guaranteeing space for student activities in perpetuity – regardless of how the relationship between students and institution might evolve. Whoever negotiated that deal understood something about institutional power.
Political capacity
A fee fight shows both what’s possible and the limits. In 2024, when the Swiss parliament pushed to triple fees for international students at ETH and EPFL, thanks to VSETH’s lobbying, the ETH Board initially opposed it. But parliament won – fees tripled from 730 to 2,190 CHF from autumn 2025.
Then the federal government proposed going further. The 2027 austerity plan is to double domestic fees to 1,460 CHF, quadruple international fees to 5,840 CHF. In October 2025, VSETH helped coordinate national protests – students in Zurich, Bern, Lausanne, Basel, Geneva. That saw two thousand students at Helvetiaplatz in Zurich, and three thousand at the Bundesplatz in Bern.
The student protests are the only protests mentioned in media related to the cuts.
That battle is still being fought in parliament. But the capacity to mount sustained, coordinated pressure – poster campaigns, media work, individual meetings with every ETH Board member – comes from having time, resources, institutional memory, and crucially associational capacity they can lean on.
On curriculum reform – a major restructuring called PAKETH – students were involved from the earliest phases. Historically, ETH students had just two weeks of holiday in the summer. Via lobbying, the Rector acknowledged this was unsustainable – research-driven teaching had, over time, led to overloaded curricula.
PAKETH – taking effect from autumn 2027 – reforms the academic calendar and exam system. There will now be two semesters of equal length, a lecture-free week in each semester, assessments linked to course units rather than crammed into separate exam periods at the end, and crucially, eight weeks in the summer for internships, rest, and actually having a life.
The vision is students who grasp core principles and master essential tools, rather than accumulating knowledge they’ll forget after exams.
VSETH shaped that reform from the start. They pushed for it in the first place, gathering evidence from the study associations. They wrote substantial consultation responses during the formal consultation period. Other stakeholders – departments, administrative units – copied their positions. Central VSETH lobbied the Rectorat while Fachvereine lobbied individual departments.
Getting change through any university involves the implicit – and often in Europe, explicit – consent of faculties, departments or schools. It’s clear here that you can be more ambitious about the scale of change possible if you have real strength in your federalised academic societies structures – because they can both shape a better proposal, and help drive it in the parts of the university likely to be most resistant.
To France now. More from Mulhouse later.
