Author:  Nadia El-Hassan Affiliation:  Independent Researcher Abstract A striking statistic often circulates in debates about higher education quality: “Nearly 40% of students in Switzerland do not finish on time.”  Read quickly, it can sound like a failure story. Read carefully, it is something else: a measurement of time-to-degree , not a measurement of whether students ultimately succeed . Using recent OECD evidence on bachelor’s completion in Switzerland—showing that 39%