The number of students and first-year students is stagnating or falling slightly.
But what about doctoral candidates?
The Federal Statistical Office has now published new figures and they show that the doctorate has by no means gone out of fashion.
On the contrary: In 2021, 200,300 people were in an ongoing doctoral process at universities in Germany.
That was 8,000 doctoral students or 4 percent more than in 2020.
Doctorates are no longer a man's job, the gender ratio is almost half-half: 48 percent are female, 52 percent male;
Compared to the previous year, the proportion of women has increased slightly.
And the group of doctoral students is also very diverse when it comes to other diversity features: 23 percent come from abroad.
There is some truth to the widespread impression that it is mainly prospective doctors who do doctorates: around a quarter of prospective doctors do their doctorate in the subject group medicine/health sciences.
However, mathematicians and natural scientists are almost as interested in doctoral degrees: 23 percent of doctoral students were in this subject group.
Engineering is in third place, followed by law, economics and social sciences.
And which German universities offer the most doctorates?
Here Heidelberg is one step ahead - the many medical students at the local Ruprecht-Karls-University are certainly one of the reasons for this.
The Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich is in second place, followed by the second Munich university, the Technical University Munich.
RWTH Aachen University, with its engineering focus, only manages fourth place.