Gütersloh (dpa) – For the first time since 2018 there has been an increase in the number of first-semester students enrolling at universities and colleges in Germany. The reason: record numbers of international students. 402,617 people started a university degree programme in the winter semester 2023/2024 – 1.1 percent more than in the previous year. According to the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE), 93,000 of them came from abroad.
More than 40 percent of foreign first-year students are from Asia. India took the top spot with 11,733 first-year students, an increase of 35 percent over the previous year. China is in second place with 5,661 new students. There are two diverging trends to be seen here: the number of first-year students from India has been increasing significantly for years, while the number from China has been in decline. Next in the ranking are Turkey, Italy, Spain and France.