As a rule, professional training plus professional experience or advanced training is sufficient.
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Berlin More and more people are taking up studies without a high school diploma: In 2021, their number reached a new record of more than 70,000. That was more than twice as many as ten years earlier, reports the CHE Center for Higher Education Development.
This means that 2.4 percent of the entire student body in Germany did not have a high school diploma. As a rule, vocational training plus professional experience or advanced training, such as to become a technician, is sufficient. The proportion is already 3.4 percent for freshmen and 1.9 percent for graduates.
“An estimated four out of five people in Germany could take up a degree based on their school or professional qualifications – and more and more are taking advantage of this option,” sums up CHE Managing Director Frank Ziegele. “The fact that more and more people want to take the best out of vocational and academic education for their educational biography shows how important a good system of post-school education is that connects both worlds.”
A good ten years ago, the admission of professionally qualified people to study courses was made easier, primarily to remedy the shortage of academics at the time. Today, the so-called “third way of education” is primarily intended to make teaching more attractive. The argument behind it: Afterwards, studying would still be possible. However, the admission requirements vary from state to state.
The highest proportion of professionally qualified freshmen is in Thuringia with more than 13 percent, followed by Hamburg and Bremen with around five percent.
About half of all students at private universities do not have a high school diploma
The head of university research at the CHE, Sigrun Nickel, says: “A ten-year comparison also shows the boom at private universities.” In 2011, just around 18 percent of all first-year students without a high school diploma or university entrance qualification enrolled there, but now it is almost 50 percent.
The admission requirements for the course vary from state to state.
(Photo: dpa)
Nickel says: “One of the main reasons for this trend is that private universities offer a very flexible range of courses with a high proportion of e-learning, which can be completed part-time.” 7.5 years older than their fellow students with Abitur and often already have families.
Around three quarters of all first-year students who do not have a high school diploma opt for practical studies at a university of applied sciences. This means that they have clearly outstripped the universities, which ten years ago still attracted every second student without an Abitur.
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Around nine out of ten of the professionally qualified students complete a bachelor’s degree. They are hardly to be found in the master’s program. More than half decide to study law, economics or social sciences. But even in subjects with restricted admission, such as medicine, every hundredth first semester student did not have a high school diploma in 2021.
More: Four-day week or overtime? How politicians want to fight the gigantic shortage of teachers.