Despite zero public fees, Germany’s private universities are booming
At first glance, Germany might seem an unlikely place for a boom in private, fee-charging universities.
Famously, the nation’s public universities are all but free to attend, even for foreign students, and are seen as consistently decent in quality.
But despite this, an ever greater number of students, German and foreign, are choosing to pay to go private, lured in by small class sizes, niche professional courses, plus parttime and evening options for those already in work. A flowering of private campuses across the country has been the result.
In the 1990s, private universities barely registered in German higher education. In 1997, just one in 100 students attended a private institution, according to the most recent statistics from Germany’s Federal Statistics Office.
But since then, “there has been quite an explosion of the private university sector”, said Andrea Frank, a researcher who has tracked the rise of private unive r s i t i e s at Stifterverband, a German businessfunded education organisation.
By 2017, one in 12 students was attending a private institution – close to a quarter of a million in total. There are now 120 private universities across Germany, up from around 50 in the early 2000s.
SRH Hochschule Berlin is one such institution. Founded in 2002 and headquartered among a cluster of other universities in the west of the capital, it now teaches around 1,200 students. The university hopes to move to a new campus, merging with two other private institutions specialising in art and design.
Around six in 10 of SRH’s students come from Germany, but relatively recent additions of engineering and computer science master’s courses taught in English have helped draw in students from India, who make up 16 per cent of the student body. Overall, private universities are growing their foreign intake rapidly – up nearly a fifth in 2018 – but are still slightly less international than their public counterparts, according to Wissenschaft Weltoffen