Bachelor and Master: According to statistics, women study faster

According to statistics, female students are more often concluding in a certain period of time than their male fellow students. This emerges from a survey by the Federal Statistical Office to new students in 2019. After eight semesters, more female (36 percent) than male students (25 percent) had achieved a bachelor’s degree.

The Federal Office announced that the final ratings raised for the first time show that many students needed more than eight semesters until they were successfully completed. Only 30 percent of the total of 515,700 students who started at a German university in 2019 created the bachelor’s degree within eight semesters.

The distance between women (27 percent) and men (12 percent) was particularly large in the humanities, the slightest in engineering (women 26 percent, men 22 percent).

Longer study times in the humanities

If you look at female and male students together, the final rate after eight semesters in legal, economic and social sciences was highest with 39 percent. The Federal Office determined the lowest quota with 22 percent for the humanities.

In the shorter master’s degrees, the odds were higher: in 2019, 206,200 people started such a course of study, after six semesters 51 percent had a degree. 54 percent of them were female and 49 percent male. There was also a difference between women and men, which was lower than in the Bachelor’s degree programs.

There are no nationwide standard study times in Germany, but the majority of these would be in six and in master courses in four semesters, the Federal Office said. A period of two additional semesters had been considered for the survey, since many students interrupt their studies in the meantime.