Foto: erstellt mit KI DALL·EIn the winter semester 2023/24, the number of students in Germany fell below 2.9 million for the first time since the winter semester 2020/21. At the same time, the number of first-year students rose again. This is shown by data from the Federal Statistical Office, which has now also been published on the hochschuldaten.de data portal of the CHE Centre for Higher Education Development.
According to the final data recently published by the Federal Statistical Office, 2,868,311 people were studying at German universities in the winter semester 2023/24 – almost 52,000 fewer than a year earlier. However, the trend varies from state to state, as the table shows. While North Rhine-Westphalia (-32,457), Hesse (-10,626) and Lower Saxony (-5,991) recorded the largest declines in student numbers, Thuringia (+8,412), Bavaria (+2,057), Brandenburg (+1,041) and Berlin (+847) gained students.
In the 2020/21 winter semester, the highest number of students in Germany to date was reached with 2,944,145 students; the 2 million mark was exceeded for the first time in the 2003/04 winter semester.
More in-depth analyses show that the growth in student numbers is primarily to be found in the universities of applied sciences/UAS sector and private universities. For example, the growth in student numbers in Thuringia in recent years is due entirely to the private IU International University based in Erfurt with a large amount of distance-learning-students. There are also differences between subjects, e.g. a boom in computer science and psychology and a decline in mechanical engineering, for example.
The situation for first-semester students is also heterogeneous in the various federal states. Across Germany, the number of students in their first semester at a university rose by 8,297. The largest increases were recorded in Bavaria (+3,227), Hesse (+2,609) and North Rhine-Westphalia (+2,310), while Thuringia (-3,707), Berlin (-440), Bremen (-296), Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (-207) and Saarland (-174) welcomed fewer first-semester students in the 2023 academic year than in the previous year.
After a high plateau in new enrolments between the winter semesters 2011/12 and 2018/19, the number of first-semester students in Germany fell again in the winter semesters 2019/20 and 2020/21. The apparent contradiction of declining student numbers and rising first semester numbers can be explained on the one hand by demographic change (declining birth rate) and on the other by the coronavirus pandemic, which also led to a slump in the number of foreign first semester students. From the winter semester 2022/23, the number of first-semester students increased, which can be explained, among other things, by a new record number of first-semester students from abroad.
Data expert Cort-Denis Hachmeister explains: ‘The strong first-semester cohorts from the years up to 2018 are now increasingly finishing their studies, while the smallest cohort with first-semester students from 2021/22 is still enrolled at the universities.’
The updated and annotated figures on students and first-year students for Germany as a whole and for the individual federal states can now be found on the CHE Higher Education Data portal (German). CHE also provides data for the federal and state governments on the following topics on the portal: Number of universities, student satisfaction, access restrictions, students without Abitur, part-time students, dual students and teacher training students.