These and other figures on the internationalisation of studying and research in Germany are contained in the statistical report “Wissenschaft weltoffen 2011”, which has just appeared. It is published jointly by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and “HIS-Institut für Hochschulforschung” (HIS-HF).
“At the moment, it is above all the Bachelors graduating from economics and social sciences who seek to go abroad to do a Masters course. In contrast, we are still observing more restraint among the engineering sciences,” Dr. Ulrich Heublein of the “HIS-Institut für Hochschulforschung” explains. Higher education institutions in the United Kingdom in particular, but also in Austria, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, are popular with the German Masters students, Heublein maintains. All in all, more than 100.000 Germans studied abroad in 2008, most of whom had not been studying in Germany before. “No Western European country has more of its own students abroad,” Dr. Simone Burkhart of the DAAD stresses.
The number of foreigners coming to Germany to study is on the increase, too. In the 2010 academic year, 181.000 enrolled at higher education institutions here. Nearly every tenth student in Germany is a foreign citizen and obtained a higher education entrance qualification abroad. The number of foreign students will be rising in future, too, for with around 61.000, more first-year students coming from other countries started doing courses in Germany in 2009 than ever before. They above all come from East Asia and Eastern Europe: China, Russia, Poland and Bulgaria head the list of countries. But students from Western European countries such as Austria and France are becoming increasingly interested in studying in Germany, too. In addition, 63.500 foreign citizens studied in Germany in 2010 who also went to school here, usually as children from immigrant families.
Particularly large numbers of foreign students go for an engineering science course – here, their share is almost twice as high as it is in other subjects. More and more frequently, foreign students are enrolling for advanced and doctoral studies courses, too. Here, a number of differences can be observed among the Federal states: the Saar, Bremen and Berlin can register a very large share of foreign students, while those in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia are still relatively small. Whereas most foreign students in Brandenburg come from Poland, in the Saar, it are French students, and in Hamburg and Saxony, Austrian students who make up the lion’s share. Chinese students head the list in all other Federal states.
“In terms of their foreign students, the German higher education institutions also compare well internationally. Together with the USA, the United Kingdom, France and Australia, Germany is attracting the largest number of mobile students from other countries,” says Burkhart, summing up the results.
“Wissenschaft weltoffen” is published annually. It contains statistics on mobility abroad among students and scientists and scholars, and it is complemented by an extensive range of data in the Internet that can be called up at http://www.wissenschaft-weltoffen.de/. For the first time, “Wissenschaft weltoffen 2011” can now also be downloaded as a pdf at
http://www.wissenschaft-weltoffen.de/publikation.
Contact
Dr. Simone Burkhart
DAAD
Head of Evaluation and Statistics Division
Phone: +49 (0) 228 - 882 - 859
Email: burkhart(at)daad.de
Dr. Ulrich Heublein, HIS-HF
Phone: +49 (0) 341 - 9730 - 342
Email: heublein(at)his.de
Press Contact:
Francis Hugenroth
DAAD
Phone: +49 (0) 228 - 882 - 454
Email: presse(at)daad.de
Theo Hafner
HIS
Phone: +49 (0) 511 - 1220 - 290
Email: hafner(at)his.de
