Private universities in Germany are outmanoeuvring their public counterparts in attracting an ever-dwindling pool of domestic students.

The average number of first-year undergraduates starting each year at state-run universities between 2019 and 2022 was 10 per cent lower than in the preceding eight academic years, compared with a 50 per cent increase at private institutions, according to a Centre for Higher Education (CHE) .

This reversal of fortunes offers a wake-up call for once popular courses, such as economics and mechanical engineering programmes at public research universities, it said.

“Private universities have changed from a peripheral phenomenon to an established element of the German higher education system,” Ulrich Müller, head of policy studies at CHE, told ̽����Ƶ.

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The reconfiguration is happening amid broad enrolment declines. First-year intakes are falling significantly across the country, the study finds, with the states of Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia the worst hit, each losing more than 10 per cent in enrolments.

An anomaly in the state-by-state breakdown is Thuringia, which saw enrolments swell by over 80 per cent, a trend-bucking trajectory driven entirely by the private IU International University, which has online students across the country but registers them in the state.

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“The general decline in the number of first-year students in Germany could have been much more pronounced, had it not been for the sharp rise in the number of enrolments at private [institutions],” said CHE statistics expert Marc Hüsch.

Mechanical and process engineering appears to have been the least alluring discipline in the past three years, recruiting almost a third fewer first-years than in the previous eight. CHE executive director Frank Ziegele said that the coming drought in engineers would exacerbate existing skills shortages, the latest confirmation of a problem that has been affecting Germany’s skills-hungry manufacturing industries for several years.

Germany’s private sector has gone through a transformation since the pre-unification founding of the first such university in 1982, Mr Müller said, with the sector once dominated by institutions pitching themselves as “better than” their no-fee counterparts but now selling itself as “different”. “They offer courses and study models state-driven universities don’t,” he said, giving online, evening and weekend delivery as examples.

Almost 80 per cent of private higher education institutions are universities of applied sciences, with most non-state students enrolled in them. As well as mopping up students crowded out of popular public programmes like psychology, these vocational institutions have combined already in-demand subjects into programmes such as business psychology and health management, he said.

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While a continuing decline in domestic students is likely to pit public and private against one another for the foreseeable future, Mr Müller said that the latter was also expanding the market by attracting those who would otherwise not have considered higher education. “People can continue their individual story on an academic level – a master craftsman studying business, an engineering draughtswoman studying design,” he said.

“These specialities are the reason why a growing number of students are willing to pay for studies in a country where state-driven universities are free,” he added. “Private universities are the innovators of the German higher education system.”

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com