Last year, 385,000 schoolchildren in Germany obtained their university entrance qualification (Abitur) or advanced technical college entrance qualification. That was 2.1 percent fewer people entitled to study than in 2021, as the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden announced according to preliminary results. According to the information, 80 percent acquired the general or subject-related university entrance qualification, 20 percent took the entrance qualification for a technical college.

This decline in the number of people eligible to study is partly due to demographics, it said. According to the data, as of December 31, 2021, the number of young people aged 17 to 19 had fallen by 0.6 percent compared to the previous year.

Meanwhile, the proportion of women among those entitled to study rose again slightly in 2022 to 54.3 percent, a year earlier it was 54.1 percent.

The statisticians also looked at the individual federal states: Accordingly, the total number of those entitled to study in the eastern German federal states (including Berlin) fell by 1.4 percent compared to 2021, in the western German states the decrease was 2.2 percent. Only in Saxony (1.5 percent) and Baden-Württemberg (1.2 percent) was there a slight increase.

More frequent university entrance qualifications for German nationals

The Federal Office also presented a special evaluation of the proportion of people entitled to study. According to this, people with German citizenship, based on their share of the population of the same age, obtained a higher education entrance qualification significantly more frequently in the years 2015 to 2021 than those with foreign citizenship. The results relate to nine federal states in which the data required to calculate the proportion of those entitled to study by nationality are available.

In concrete terms, the rate of those with German citizenship who were entitled to study in 2021 was 53.4 percent, in 2015 it was still 56.5 percent. The rate of foreigners who acquired a university entrance qualification was 16 percent in 2021. It had fallen from 16.1 percent in 2015 to 14.5 percent in 2019 and has since risen again.