Statistics: More foreign students at German universities

In the study year 2024, more people started studying at a university in Germany. A total of around 491,400 people started studying for the first time and thus two percent more than in the 2023 study year, as the Federal Statistical Office announced. The increase is based solely on new students from abroad.

The preliminary figures relate to the summer semester 2024 and the winter semester 2024/2025. In the period, the proportion of new students without German citizenship increased by around ten percent in the previous year comparison, while the number of new German students decreased by around one percent. According to the data, around 30 percent of all new students were foreigners in 2024. For comparison: ten years earlier, the proportion was 22 percent.

Strong growth in engineering and medicine

The recent increase in the general first semester is inconsistently distributed to the respective subject groups, as the Federal Office continued. There were above -average growth, for example, in the area of ​​engineering (plus 3.6 percent) or human medicine/health sciences (plus 3 percent).

On the other hand, the increase in new students in legal, economic and social sciences (plus 0.6 percent) and the humanities (plus 0.4 percent) was less. In the subject group of art and art science, the number decreased by 1.2 percent.

The total number of students remains constant

And what about the total number of students? According to the data, this remained almost constant in the winter semester 2024/2025 compared to the winter semester 2023/2024. The number of German students decreased by one percent, while the number of foreign students increased by five percent to around 492,600.