Digitization, energy transition and climate protection, transformation of industry - Germany, which has been used to success as a location for business and innovation, is currently being put to the test.

And there are already doubts as to whether he will survive them without major injuries.

But now a report from the Federal Statistical Office marks a new setback: fewer and fewer young people are studying in the fields of mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology, the so-called MINT subjects.

The lack of such specialists, which is already slowing down technological progress, threatens to worsen further.

In addition, the next generation of students do not have the right conditions to quickly reverse the trend.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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As the official statisticians announced on Monday, a total of 307,059 people began studying MINT subjects at German universities in 2021.

That was 6.5 percent less than in 2020 and even 12.5 percent less than in 2017. At that time, the number of STEM students had peaked at 351,000.

The recent decline can also be partly explained by the consequences of the corona pandemic: In times of lockdown and contact restrictions, fewer people started studying.

But the decline was particularly strong in the MINT subjects.

Their share of the total number of first-year students has fallen from significantly more than 40 percent at times to under 38 percent;

moreover, the crumbling had already begun before the pandemic.

The KfW development bank has just clarified the concerns this causes on a macroeconomic scale with a study: If productivity progress remains as weak as it has been for several years and at the same time the decline in the domestic supply of skilled workers increases, then Germany is threatened with a "turning point" economically - towards an era stagnating or even declining prosperity (FAZ of January 23).

Without more young people in the MINT professions, "the innovative and competitive ability of the German economy would be increasingly impaired".

The federal government is also concerned with what is at stake.

This is proven by her skilled labor strategy, which the Bundestag has just dealt with: "Increasingly dynamic digitization is contributing to the strong job development and thus to the ongoing bottlenecks in IT professions and in the professional group 'Technical Research and Development'," she writes in her report.

“Many people with non-specialist qualifications are already working in these professions, and the annual working time is already above average.” It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult for employers to find staff for these tasks.

learning gaps in mathematics

Axel Plünnecke, educational researcher at the German Economic Institute (IW) and author of a semi-annual "MINT Report" for the employers' associations, attributes the trend reversal to deeper causes - above all the unfavorable development of general education schools.

He backs it up with this comparison: From the turn of the millennium to 2012, the PISA tests found increasing competences of 15-year-old students in mathematics and natural sciences - and in line with this, the number of students entering STEM subjects increased from 2005.

Since 2012, however, the PISA tests have shown declining skills among 15-year-olds in these subjects – and at almost the same time, the number of first-year students in this area began to crumble.

But that's not all: The consequences of the pandemic and lockdowns at schools are likely to continue to weigh on the flow of MINT courses "in the coming years, as learning gaps in mathematics have appeared," Plünnecke notes.

Instead of improving schools in these subjects, which is actually necessary, Corona has brought another setback.

This makes catch-up programs all the more important, especially to quickly close the learning gaps that have arisen among elementary school students.

The mechanical engineering association VDMA shares the analysis and points to a high number of school dropouts.

"In order to counter the shortage of skilled workers, more young people must be brought to a school-leaving certificate," warns Hartmut Rauen, Deputy General Manager.

More qualified immigration, more full-time work and more further training are other major tasks for politicians.

An evaluation recently presented by the Stifterverband provides further indications of how more schoolchildren could find access to a MINT degree: While many European countries have long had computer science as a compulsory subject in their schools, such classes in Germany – with the exception of a few federal states – have so far been common only offered as an elective.