The number of freshmen is falling. This development shows the consequences of the pandemic, but also demographic change.
In the academic year 2021 (summer semester 2021 and winter semester 2021/2022), 471,600 first-year students enrolled for the first time at a German university. That is four percent less than in the 2020 academic year and seven percent less than before the corona pandemic (2019). This emerges from preliminary results published by the Federal Statistical Office on Monday.
The drop in first-semester students in the field of sport (minus 17 percent), agricultural, forestry and nutritional sciences (minus eight percent) and the humanities (minus six percent) was above average. In human medicine/health sciences, on the other hand, there was an increase of five percent, mainly due to the eight percent increase in health sciences.
The number of foreign students in their first university semester has therefore partially recovered: due to the pandemic, it initially fell by 20 percent from 125,400 to 100,400 in the 2020 academic year and rose again by 15 percent to 115,400 in the 2021 academic year. The number of German first-year students, on the other hand, initially rose by around two percent from 383,300 to 389,800 in the first year of the corona virus, 2020, but fell by around nine percent to 356,200 in the 2021 academic year.
However, demographic change should also be taken into account with the decline in first-year students: between 2019 and 2021, the age group of 17 to 22-year-olds, from which around three quarters of first-year students currently come, shrank by four percent.
The demographic development is also affecting the total number of students, which stagnated for the first time in the 2021/2022 winter semester after years of growth and is still 2.9 million . Around two percent fewer students were enrolled at universities than in the previous year, and around two percent more at universities of applied sciences.