According to the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), around 138,800 German students were enrolled at foreign universities in 2022, a 1,300-person or 0.9% increase from the previous year. The growth is primarily attributed to an additional 1,700 students in Austria, 600 in Portugal and 500 in Denmark, according to the statisticians.
The largest percentage increase in German students was seen in Malta (405%), Finland (83%), Malaysia (58%), South Africa (54%) and Croatia (51%).
After a pandemic-induced decline in German students abroad in 2020, the trend has been upward again since 2021. The number of German students abroad has increased by 4.5% compared to the pandemic year of 2020 and has reached a level slightly above that of the pre-Corona era of 2019. Considering the German students abroad worldwide, there were 54 students abroad for every 1,000 in Germany.
The three most popular destinations for German students abroad in 2022 were Austria (37,800 students), the Netherlands (22,600 students) and Switzerland (12,500 students). In 2022, more than half (53%) of the German students abroad were enrolled in one of these three most popular countries, with a total of 68% in the European Union.
The most popular fields of study for German students abroad were “Economics, Administration and Law”with 24,600 (24%) and “Social Sciences, Journalism and Information”with 21,700 (21%) students, according to Destatis. Of the 22,600 German students in the Netherlands, nearly two-thirds of the students chose these fields of study.
In the field of “Human Medicine”, due to the limited number of study places in Germany, many German students of this field opt for an international study in Eastern Europe, explained the statisticians. In Lithuania, 73%, in Hungary, 61% and in Poland, 56% of the German students in the field of “Human Medicine”were enrolled. Of the Germans enrolled at Czech universities, 43% were in this field and in Bulgaria, the figure was 82% (latest data available for 2023, with no data for 2022).