“The COVID-19 pandemic has had little impact on international student mobility”

The new compact edition of Wissenschaft weltoffen was published a little later than usual this year, as the structure and content of the publication have been fundamentally revised by the project partners responsible, the DAAD and the DZHW. In this interview, Naomi Knüttgen, one of the two project managers at the DAAD, explains exactly what changes the relaunch entails, how the main and compact editions of Wissenschaft weltoffen relate to one another, and which data in the new compact edition she considers particularly noteworthy.

Ms Knüttgen, this year’s edition of Wissenschaft weltoffen kompakt has been published slightly later than usual. A key reason for this was the fundamental overhaul of the publication’s format. Could you explain what motivated this change and exactly what has changed compared to previous editions?

With this relaunch, we have fundamentally adapted the compact edition of Wissenschaft weltoffen to the structure of the main edition. Our aim was to make all the subject areas that Wissenschaft weltoffen has to offer available to readers here as well. Until now, the compact edition had only covered four subject areas or chapters from the main edition. However, as the main edition has now contained a total of six chapters for the past two years, we felt it was time to expand the compact edition accordingly.

In addition to the existing thematic areas – international students worldwide, international students in Germany, German students abroad, and international academics and researchers in Germany – the new compact edition now also covers data on academics and researchers from Germany abroad, as well as the structures of internationalisation at German universities. To achieve this, we have increased the length by just four pages, so the compact edition remains clear and handy, whilst now covering all the key topics from the main edition of Wissenschaft weltoffen. However, should anyone reading this feel that a particularly important piece of information or illustration is missing from the main edition, please do not hesitate to contact us at any time; such feedback is always very helpful to us!

The compact edition of Wissenschaft weltoffen is always published in the spring, alternating every six months with the main edition, which is published in the autumn. What is the reason for this? And what implications does this alternating publication schedule have for the use of both editions?

Until 2014, there was in fact only the main edition of Wissenschaft weltoffen, which had always been published annually in the autumn, effectively at the start of the winter semester. However, the various data sources we use in Wissenschaft weltoffen update their statistics at different times throughout the year. Some of the basic data, particularly that from the Federal Statistical Office, tends to be published towards the end of the year or at the start of the following year, by which time the main edition is already in the final stages of editing or has already been published. The publication date of the compact edition in the spring was therefore deliberately chosen to enable us to ‘supply’ readers with the latest data that did not make it into the previous main edition.

In practical terms, this means that the compact edition for a given year will, for the first time, contain the latest data on global student mobility, international students, international academic staff in Germany, and German students abroad, which will then be analysed in greater depth in the subsequent main edition. However, this does not mean that the main edition will contain only data already included in the compact edition. For one thing, the scope of the data presented in the main edition is significantly greater.  And for another, there are also data sets that are being published for the first time in the main edition. These include data on academic staff at non-university research institutions, on funded visiting researchers, and all data on the structures of internationalisation at higher education institutions in Germany in Chapter F. Some of this data is also collected specifically for the main edition by our project partner, the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies – DZHW for short. This includes data on funded visiting researchers, data on international participants in preparatory colleges, and data on staff at international offices.

To conclude, let’s take a look at the contents of the new issue: if you had to choose three particularly fascinating findings or illustrations to recommend to our readers, which ones would they be?

I find it remarkable that student mobility has increased significantly once again worldwide. In 2023, 7.3 million students were enrolled outside their country of origin, which was around 400,000 more than in the previous year. This trend also shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has had little impact on international student mobility, apart from a brief and only slight decline in 2021. We are now well above the pre-pandemic level of 6.1 million students in 2019, and there is currently no sign of an end to this annual growth.

This trend is also evident in Germany: in the 2024/25 winter semester, around 402,000 international students were enrolled here – more than ever before. More than half of them are STEM students, who will be in particularly high demand on the German labour market after graduation.

The number of international academic staff at German universities also rose again in 2024, now standing at around 68,300 employees, or 16 percent of the total academic staff. By way of comparison, in 2014 the figure stood at around 41,000 employees, or 12 percent; the trend over the last ten years has therefore been encouragingly dynamic in this regard as well.

Finally, I would also like to highlight two important changes to the statistics: Firstly, the Erasmus statistics have been converted to calendar years. The previous statistics were based on Erasmus funding periods, which varied in length depending on the programme generation, ranging from twelve to 26 months. Fortunately, we now have – as with most other time series – a data set that is easy to understand and comparable across the years.

We have also recently incorporated data from the new doctoral student statistics, which now include doctoral students who are not enrolled. Previously, there were two sets of statistics providing data on doctoral students: the student statistics, which distinguished between foreign doctoral students with and without a German university entrance certificate but only covered those who were enrolled. And the previous doctoral student statistics, which also covered non-enrolled doctoral students but did not allow for a distinction between foreign doctoral students with and without a German university entrance certificate. However, as this distinction is now also possible in the doctoral student statistics, we have included it in our reporting; the count of international doctoral students is therefore now more complete than before.

As these two examples clearly demonstrate, with every new issue of Wissenschaft weltoffen we strive to make the data we collect even more comprehensive, meaningful and helpful for our readers. And here too, we welcome suggestions regarding relevant data sources that have not yet been included!