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 M¨¹ller, head of policy studies at CHE, told Times Higher Education.

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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 H¨¹sch.

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 M¨¹ller 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 M¨¹ller 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 ¨C 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