What success rate is reasonable?

 

This post was originally posted on LinkedIn on Sept 25th, 2026 and added here on October 18th, 2025, with minor edits, for the record.
 

I am reading

A lot of shocked comments about the MSCA 2026 call. 21,627 applicants, 1600 projects will be funded. See here. If you divide the two, you get a success rate of about 7% , in reality it will be different across panels, some might be less or even more competitive.

I agree it’s outrageous but frankly, this is no surprise. I mean… welcome to the club! These low success rates are aligned to those in other national public and private career grant calls, in EU or US. If you look at HE pillar II, success rates in some topics are down to 2-4%. Dozens of collaborative consortium project proposals for 2-3 spots and honestly it takes 10x more time to write one of those 45 pages proposals with 15-20 partners, that you can’t even resubmit later! I have heard some horror stories with topics with 100 proposals for 2 funded projects. It’s an insane waste of time.

I have been a MSCA and HE evaluator, there is no way you can accurately distinguish a 97.5 from a 97 score on MSCA proposal. Or 4.5 from 5 score on impact for a RIA/IA. The evaluation process is not even close to something scientific and reproducible. The uncertainty on these numbers is large and basically above a certain threshold it’s all due to chance and gets down to what is a “minor” or “major” shortcoming on largely irrelevant issues (yes, including the Gantt chart). It is a very organized but still human, messy, subjective, and yes also random evaluation system. I don’t want to discuss ERC because it’s out of my league but from what I have seen and seem to understand same considerations might apply.

I don’t think the research funding system is geared for this kind of volume ANYWHERE (not only on MSCA) and if we want higher success rates, we need to change the system as such, because it will only get worse.

I am shouting out to the European Commission first because they are those who can fix this and - sorry to be too honest - they need to wake up real quick because this had to be done yesterday, the signs have been there for a long time. You want to run a neoliberal funding system - ok - but then get some good economist to check your budgets as my impression is that with all this wasted writing application time and resources we are now having a net-negative economic balance.In plain English, we are losing money.

What concern me most is that the solution might be an even more distorted system, as the the quickest (and worse!) fix is to introduce some type of perverse gate-keeping mechanism, we are already seeing examples…

End of rant.