Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit company supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

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IntroductionSwitzerland is among the countries with the lowest baccalaureate rate and therefore also among the countries with relatively limited access to universities (SKBF, 2014). Moreover, each year, some 20% of baccalaureate holders do not start any form of university study, thus limiting the numbers even more. Although, unlike in most other countries, Swiss universities are not allowed to carry out any form of selection of their students, given the low baccalaureate rate, it can nevertheless be assumed that, on average, they attract students with good to very good academic abilities. Before the Bologna reform (five-year Licentiate degree courses), between 1975 and 2001, over one third of the students had not completed their studies within ten years 1 and most had definitively dropped out. Of those who started a three-year Bachelor degree course after the implementation of the Bologna reform, the failure rate after six years was 28.1%. 2 Even if not all students who drop out of their degree courses at university end up without a university degree -some obtain a degree in Switzerland at a university of applied sciences or a pedagogical university, or a university degree abroad -the question of who drops out of university in Switzerland and why is of great importance, as the call for a higher baccalaureate rate to cover the oftlamented shortage of academics would have to be seen in a new light if such an increase were to be associated with higher drop-out rates at universities. We therefore need to know more about whether dropping out is due to personal decisions which are difficult to influence and about how many drop-outs today are the result of poor preparation for study and/or of poor performance during the degree course. Should the latter predominate, there would be a great risk that simply raising the baccalaureate rate in Switzerland would not bring the desired increase in academics or, to a lesser extent, at very high social and individual costs.This article assesses the university careers of all students who started a degree course at a Swiss university between 1975 and 2008. The key advantage of the available data is that they cover the entire student population over a long period and thus warrant against distortions which might arise in random samples or against non-representative results, for instance when special effects only involve specific student cohorts. The disadvantage is that such administrative data only contain a limited number of personal characteristics relating to the students and therefore many questions either cannot be answered or can only be answered approximatively. To compensate somewhat for this drawback, we refer to the results in the research literature of a recent Systematic Review on university drop-outs to interpret our empirical results.This article is structured as follows: following a summary of the findings from the Systematic Review, the data and definitions are set out. The descriptive results bs_bs_banner

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation trying to explain individual time‐to‐degree variances with business cycle fluctuations. Assuming that students determine the optimum study length at university weighing up the cost of an additional semester against the consumption benefit of studying and not yet working, the general economic environment during the study period should, in turn, influence the individual time‐to‐degree through changes in the cost level and the consumption benefit of an additional semester. The investigation, using a representative data‐set based on Swiss university graduates from 1981 to 2001, shows that changes in the unemployment rate have a significant impact on individual time‐to‐degree.time‐to‐degree, business cycle, consumption benefit,