The next decade, big opportunity in the German market:

One of the main reasons suggesting this development will continue or even expand is the fact that the German secondary, pre-university schooling period is changing from a total of 9 years to 8 years, reducing the total length of general schooling to 12 instead of 13 years. This will create a temporary doubling of school-leaving Germans with a university entrance qualification, which will happen on a annual basis rolling through several German states each year starting in 2008 and ending in 2014. German student numbers with a university entrance qualification will remain above today’s level until about 2020, reaching 2.5 million at the development’s peak.

At the same time, Germany is maintaining its traditional barrier to higher education in the form of its “numerus clausus”, which stipulates the minimum mark needed in the German university entrance certificate for acceptance into a certain type of subject (medicine, law, architecture, etc.) or into a particular university. This barrier has been a strong driving force for German students to look for alternatives to higher education in Germany, traditionally by choosing vocational education but increasingly also by going abroad.

But let’s first have a look at several basic figures describing the German market.