Total figures and past growth:

Of the about 3.2m internationally mobile students in 2010, roughly 90,000 will be German, or about 3 percent of all international students in the world. Unfortunately, this number has declined relative to other upcoming sending countries of whom mostly all are in Asia or Africa, from which there will be a total of about 2.1m international students in 2010.

Germany and France are still the two biggest sending countries in Western Europe, but both of their populations (and student populations) are declining relative to other global markets. Compared to the global growth in other countries between 1990 and 2006, Germany went from roughly 5% of all international students in the world to about 2.8% in 2006, a drop of 45% in absolute terms. But this is due more to the fact that other countries were suddenly supplying a much larger number of students.

Currently, 4.8% of all German students are studying abroad.
About 23,000 German students went on exchange programmes in 2006, and about 15% of all German students go on a semester abroad during the course of a bachelor’s degree. The growth rate of Germans studying abroad was an average of 9.3% in the decade from 1996 to 2006, when student numbers rose from roughly 43,000 to about 82,000. And this growth rate is expected to continue over the next decade.