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Students at the University of Freiburg

Photo: Patrick Seeger/picture alliance/dpa

For the first time since 2018, more first-semester students have enrolled at universities and colleges in Germany. According to preliminary figures from the Federal Statistical Office, there were 402,617 first-year students in the 2023/2024 winter semester, an increase of 1.1 percent compared to the previous year, as reported by the Center for University Development (CHE) in Gütersloh.

According to an analysis by the CHE, the number has stabilized because significantly more people from abroad want to study in Germany. “The slight increase in first-semester students can be explained primarily by a record number of foreign first-year students,” explains CHE project manager Marc Hüsch. At the beginning of the corona pandemic, the number of foreign first-year students fell significantly, but that has changed again. However, detailed figures are so far only available for the winter semester 2022/2023.

Most international freshmen come from India

At this point in time, more than 40 percent of the 93,000 foreign first-year students came from Asia, with 11,733 of the first-year students coming from India alone. China is in second place with 5,661 first-year students. An opposite trend can be seen here. The number of new students from India has been rising sharply for years, while the number from China has been declining.

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The number of new students in Germany had been rising for decades, reaching its peak of 445,000 in the winter semester of 2011/2012. After stagnating at a high level, the values ​​have fallen significantly again since the 2019/20 winter semester. The CHE sees one reason for this in the decline in birth rates in Germany between 1990 and 2011.

Corona caused a decline

But Corona also caused a decline in the number of first semester students. “At the beginning of the pandemic, the number of foreign first-year students fell significantly, but now they are enrolling at German universities in large numbers again,” explains Marc Hüsch from CHE. The number of German first-year students, on the other hand, continues to decline and was almost 305,000 in the 2022/2023 winter semester.

When it comes to the choice of subjects, two trends continue: In the field of mechanical engineering/process engineering, the number of first-year students has halved since 2011/2012, while computer science is reporting sustained growth, according to the CHE evaluation. The CHE is a joint subsidiary of the Bertelsmann Foundation and the University Rectors' Conference.

olb/AFP/dpa