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Students rarely sit in the lecture hall, most study online (symbol image)
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Oliver Berg / picture alliance / dpa
The corona pandemic has caused the number of new students at German universities to fall significantly from abroad.
99,400 and thus 21 percent fewer foreign students registered for the first semester last year, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on the basis of preliminary results.
The number of German freshmen, on the other hand, rose slightly by two percent to 389,200.
"The extraordinarily sharp decline in foreign students is largely due to the corona pandemic, as a result of which it was considerably more difficult for students from abroad to start studying at a German university," the Federal Office said.
A total of 488,600 first-year students enrolled at a German university for the first time in the 2020 summer semester and the following winter semester.
The number fell by four percent compared to the previous year.
With a decline of 42 percent year-on-year, the Federal Office recorded the largest relative decline in foreign first-year students in the humanities.
Most of the first-time enrollments of foreign students were therefore in the subject groups engineering sciences as well as law, economics and social sciences.
But here, too, the number fell significantly with minus 17 percent and minus 16 percent.
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