More foreign students in Germany
Some 2.8 million students at German universities. The number of first-year students has increased. More and more come from abroad.
Wiesbaden (dpa) – There was an increase in the number of people who started studying at a university in Germany in the 2024 academic year. According to the Federal Statistical Office, a total of around 491,400 people began studying for the first time – two per cent more than in the 2023 academic year.
The statistics show that this increase was solely due to first-year students from abroad. Their share rose by around ten per cent compared to the previous year, while the number of German first-year students fell by around one per cent. According to the data, around 30 per cent of all first-year students in 2024 were foreigners. By way of comparison: ten years previously the proportion was 22 per cent. The total number of foreign students increased by five per cent to around 492,600.
There was above-average growth in the engineering sciences (plus 3.6 per cent) and human medicine/health sciences (plus 3 per cent), for instance. The increase was lower among first-year students in the areas of law, economics and social sciences (up 0.6 per cent) and also in the humanities (up 0.4 per cent).