Student cities in Germany
Same country, very different lives. Each city page covers student life, real costs, every university and the community for your home country, with sources.
Berlin
Berlin · 132 programmes
Germany's capital and its biggest student city: four public research universities, more than 30 other colleges, and residents from about 190 countries.
Munich
Bavaria · 63 programmes
Germany's strongest technical university, a very large international student crowd, the Alps an hour or two away, and the hardest room hunt in the country.
Aachen
North Rhine-Westphalia · 44 programmes
A technical-university city where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands meet, with Charlemagne's cathedral in the middle of the old town.
Hamburg
Hamburg · 42 programmes
Germany's second-largest city and its biggest port, with canals, two lakes in the centre, and a long list of universities and specialist schools.
Cologne
North Rhine-Westphalia · 41 programmes
A million people on the Rhine, a cathedral you can see from the lecture hall, three public universities and a long list of specialist and private schools.
Dresden
Saxony · 41 programmes
A baroque capital on the Elbe with a technical university, a large chip industry and the Saxon Switzerland rocks just outside.
Stuttgart
Baden-Württemberg · 41 programmes
A hilly valley city of about 609,000 people where the car, the engineering degree and the vineyard all sit within one tram ride.
Bonn
North Rhine-Westphalia · 38 programmes
A calm Rhine city with a big research university, Beethoven's birthplace and the United Nations on campus, 24 km from Cologne.
Bremen
Bremen · 36 programmes
A Hanseatic port city on the Weser with a research university, a dense space and marine science scene, and cheap student rooms.
Dortmund
North Rhine-Westphalia · 35 programmes
A Ruhr city that swapped coal and steel for logistics, software and research, with a lake, a football stadium and student rooms near campus
Erlangen
Bavaria · 32 programmes
A small city with one big university, a medical-technology industry and a twelve-day beer festival on a hill.
Tübingen
Baden-Württemberg · 32 programmes
A small river town where about one in three residents is a student, with a university founded in 1477 and one of Germany's densest research clusters.
Göttingen
Lower Saxony · 30 programmes
A small university town where the university is the town, and the old centre fits inside a ring of grassy ramparts.
Würzburg
Bavaria · 30 programmes
A baroque palace, a fortress on the hill and vineyards inside the city limits, with a 600-year-old university and about 35,000 students among 134,000 residents.
Ingolstadt
Bavaria · 29 programmes
Bavaria's first university town, now the home of Audi and a technical university that teaches in English.
Frankfurt am Main
Hesse · 28 programmes
Germany's financial centre and busiest airport, with a skyline, a European central bank, more than thirty museums and a city where about half the residents have roots abroad.
Potsdam
Brandenburg · 28 programmes
A lake-and-palace capital city on Berlin's southwest border, with a university, a film school and a computer science institute.
Lüneburg
Lower Saxony · 27 programmes
A small salt-trade town on the Ilmenau, with one university, a heath on the doorstep and Hamburg 50 km away.
Bochum
North Rhine-Westphalia · 26 programmes
A university city that grew where the coal mines used to be, with one big campus, a pub district of 80 venues and a lake you can reach on the same tram ticket.
Leipzig
Saxony · 25 programmes
A trade, music and university city in eastern Germany, with lakes on its southern edge and a large arts and student scene.
Magdeburg
Saxony-Anhalt · 25 programmes
A mid-sized Elbe city with two universities, a large English-taught master's offer, dorm rooms from about 195 EUR and a student community that already counts people from over 90 countries.
Saarbrücken
Saarland · 25 programmes
A small state capital on the French border, with a computer-science campus and a degree-and-language mix you do not find elsewhere in Germany.
Kaiserslautern
Rhineland-Palatinate · 23 programmes
A technical university city at the edge of the Palatinate Forest, with research institutes on campus and a football stadium on the hill.
Bayreuth
Bavaria · 21 programmes
A small Franconian town with a campus university, a UNESCO opera house and forest on every side.