Bern nearly tripled its fee for international students and lost more than a third of its new entrants. Europe keeps relearning the same lesson
When Bern’s Grand Council voted to charge international students CHF 2,550 (€2,700) a semester – up from CHF 950 (€1,000), and three times the domestic rate – the pitch was that foreign students would help fill a gap left by federal and cantonal cuts.
A year on, the canton’s government has published the first numbers in reply to a question from Green and Social Democrat members, and they don't look great.
New international enrolments at the University of Bern fell by 37.6 per cent this autumn – 105 fewer students – and the government expects the rise to bring in CHF 278,400 (€295,000). That only counts the students who turned up. Take off what the missing 105 would have paid at the old rate and the gain is nearer CHF 180,000 (€190,000), a rounding error in a university budget.
The government doesn’t defend the policy. Its answer concedes that the ETH model it copied was “aimed at deterrence”, that the fall is “likely primarily due” to the fee, and that it “will significantly weaken” the extra income.
Bern isn’t alone. Across Europe this autumn, governments short of money are reaching for the same lever. Austria’s liberal Neos, part of the governing coalition, want the fee for students from outside the EU raised from €726.72 a semester to €2,500.
France has capped the exemptions that let universities ignore its higher fees for non-EU students. Finland now requires fees to cover the full cost of teaching, and the Università della Svizzera italiana is moving fees for students from outside Switzerland to CHF 5,000 (€5,300) a semester from 2027.
The good news for ministers is that Europe has run this experiment several times. The bad news is what it keeps finding.
Where study was free and fees arrived for the first time, the number of new non-EU students fell sharply and at once – and the bigger the fee, the bigger the fall.
Baden-Württemberg’s €1,500 a semester in 2017 cut new non-EU entrants by 19 per cent, from 7,115 to 5,754, according to the state’s own monitoring board. Finland’s fees, typically €8,000 to €12,000 at universities, cut new non-EU students by 36 per cent the same year, from 4,650 to 2,994, according to the ministry’s evaluation.
Denmark lost 42 per cent in 2006 and a further 13 per cent in 2007, according to figures compiled by Norway’s education ministry.
Where fees were set to cover the full cost, it got brutal. New non-EU students in Sweden fell from about 8,000 to 1,650 when fees arrived in 2011 – close to 80 per cent – according to UKÄ, the higher education authority. Norway’s admissions from outside the European Economic Area fell from about 3,700 to 2,000 in 2023, and the ministry puts the fall among those who actually had to pay at more than 80 per cent.
And the gap doesn’t close quickly. New non-EU students in Sweden were still 11 per cent below their pre-fee level in 2024/25, 13 years on, according to official statistics. Baden-Württemberg never got back to its 2016/17 intake.
The losses aren’t spread evenly. In one year Sweden’s entrants from Pakistan fell from 991 to 63, and from Bangladesh from 576 to 45. Students from China fell too, by 77 per cent, but they came back – students from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran never did.
Baden-Württemberg lost almost half its North African entrants. A study by Antonia Vortisch finds the effect was concentrated among students from Africa and Asia, with no improvement in exam results to show for it.
When fees arrived in Finland, applications to English-taught courses barely moved – down 7 per cent – but enrolments fell 30 per cent. Students still applied, then didn’t turn up, and research by Mathies, Karhunen, and DesJardins finds the intake shifted towards students from richer countries. The fee changed who came as much as how many.
If the aim is income, the record is worse. Finland’s universities charged €42.8 million in fees in 2019–20 and handed €28.6 million back in waivers and scholarships, leaving about €14 million across the whole system.
France’s higher fees for non-EU students raised about €26 million in 2022–23, according to the Cour des comptes, because universities that refused to charge them exempted roughly nine in ten of the students affected. Hence this year’s decree, which caps exemptions at 30 per cent, falling to 20 per cent from 2028–29. The minister now expects about €250 million a year – as long as the students keep coming.
Norway is the full cautionary tale. The state cut funding on the assumption that fees would replace it, but most state institutions raised less than NOK 2 million (€185,000) each in 2024, and the University of Oslo took about NOK 12 million (€1.1 million) against a NOK 53.4 million (€4.9 million) cut. Three years in, the government has dropped the rule that fees must cover the full cost.
Sweden is the partial exception, and even that took a long time. Fee income reached SEK 1.5 billion (€133 million) in 2025, but it started well below the SEK 539 million (€48 million) a year the state had cut from teaching grants to pay for the reform, and took more than a decade to build.
Price matters, but what matters most is price compared with the alternatives. Students priced out of one system rarely give up on Europe – they go next door.
Between 2016/17 and 2021/22, international student numbers in Baden-Württemberg fell by 9 per cent while Germany as a whole grew by 32 per cent and fee-free Bavaria by 60 per cent.
In Bern, the same fee rise that cost the university 37.6 per cent of its new international students cost the Bern University of Applied Sciences just 4.7 per cent. The government’s own answer says Bern now charges international students more than any comparable Swiss university – and anyone who wanted a Swiss degree could get one in Basel, Geneva, or Lausanne at the domestic rate.
Since the full-cost rule went in Norway, the institutions that cut their fees have seen their 2026 intake multiply – the University of South-Eastern Norway from 15 to 101, the University of Stavanger from 13 to 86, and OsloMet from 2 to 35. Oslo, Bergen, and NTNU kept high fees and saw no rise, according to provisional figures gathered by Khrono.
The flip side is that where fees rise but stay cheap compared with the alternatives, demand holds. Flanders has pushed non-EU fees up sharply – Ghent’s master’s fee for students from outside the European Economic Area has gone from €2,297 to €7,079 for new entrants. Yet non-EU enrolments rose from about 12,600 in 2016–17 to over 23,600 in 2024–25, according to De Tijd.
Austria’s new entrants from outside the EU grew by 24 per cent between 2019/20 and 2022/23 at €727 a semester. Johannes Kepler University Linz now has so many applications – around 10,000 – that it is bringing in face-to-face document checks.
Where fees already exist, raising them does less damage. A rough sum on Bern’s numbers suggests every 10 per cent rise in price cost around 5 per cent of new international students. That wipes out most of the gain for a university at the top of its national price range, and much less for one sitting comfortably below it.
ETH Zurich tripled its fees for foreign students in 2025 and saw little change in international bachelor’s entry, because nowhere cheaper offers the same thing.
There’s a respectable case that students from outside the EU should pay towards the cost of their education. There’s a separate case – made openly in Austria, Finland, and Sweden – that fees weed out applicants using study as a route to residence. The evidence suggests that governments need to be honest about which they’re after, because the same fee can’t reliably do both.
A fee designed to deter works, and hits students from poorer countries hardest. A fee designed to raise money works only where a university offers something its neighbours can’t, sets a price that stays competitive with them, and doesn’t waive most of it away.
Most of the rises now on the table in Europe are sold as the second and designed like the first – and ministries are still counting the income before they’ve counted the costs of students who won’t arrive.