‘Brutal’ success rate for European postdoctoral fellowships

Less than 10 per cent of researchers who applied to a prestigious European postdoctoral fellowship secured funding in the latest round, which saw a record number of applicants in the programme’s 30-year history.

The European Commission will award €404.3 million (£352 million) to 1,610 postdoctoral researchers in the 2025 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) call, marking a 9.6 per cent success rate for a total of 17,066 applications (16,836 of which were deemed eligible).

In the 2024 call for applications, the commission awarded €417 million to 10,360 researchers, which amounted to a success rate of 16.6 per cent. In the previous year, 15.8 per cent of the 8,039 applicants were selected for funding.

The UK was awarded the highest number of fellowships (347), followed by Spain (182), Italy (174), France (130), Germany (125) and Switzerland (114).

The latest call saw a nearly 65 per cent jump in the number of proposals compared with last year. Applications from researchers based in the US have also risen sharply, with 998 submissions for European fellowships in the latest call, a 185 per cent increase on the previous year, according to the career support network Euraxess.

Out of the total funding, €343.7 million will support 1,446 researchers through European postdoctoral fellowships, while €60.6 million will fund 164 global postdoctoral fellowships, which allow researchers to spend part of their project outside the EU or Horizon Europe-associated countries before returning to Europe. The top country in this category is the US, followed by Canada, Australia and Brazil.

Postdoctoral researchers say the fellowships have become increasingly difficult to obtain, with many pointing to the sharp drop in the success rate in recent years and the record number of applicants.

Boris Louis, a postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium, said the low success rate was “frightening”.

“With 90.7 per cent, like many, my proposal did not make the cut,” he writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Academia has entered a phase of extreme selectivity, where many strong, well-designed, and impactful projects simply cannot be funded due to budget limits.”

Talented researchers spent months writing proposals with “single-digit odds” and great research was being “filtered out by statistics”, he adds.

Olga Byrska, a PhD candidate at the European University Institute, described the figures as “brutal”.

“For a scholarship of two-three years only, no matter how prestigious, it only shows how impossible academia has become. We must be pushing governments to enlarge spending for science and humanities, not to cut it,” she says on LinkedIn. 

Those selected represent about 80 nationalities and will work in 45 countries across the world, according to the commission. The top disciplines are social sciences and humanities with 23.4 per cent of the projects, followed by life sciences with 20.8 per cent.

seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com