New Edvance study: Changing patterns in Chinese student mobility to Germany

October 31, 2024

This new report, written by Robert van Kan (director, Edvance Education International), discusses recent trends and developments in student mobility to Germany from China, for many years the main supplier of international students to all major study destinations, including Germany itself. It focusses on how recent changes in the international education landscape and within China itself are impacting on the ability of German universities to attract Chinese students, and what they can do to improve their performance in Chinese student recruitment in the years to come. The report also compares and analyzes the performance in international and Chinese student recruitment of almost 60 German universities for the period 2015 to 2023, based on data provided by Destatis, the German Federal Bureau of Statistics.

It is one of the main findings of this study that post-covid incoming mobility from China is recovering at a slower pace than outbound mobility from China, hinting that Germany may have lost some of its appeal as a study destination. Moreover, there is a growing concentration of Chinese students at a handful of the country’s top-ranked institutions, while many German universities have been losing considerably more Chinese students over the past few years than the overall statistics seem to suggest. The existing models of promotion that most German universities rely on to attract Chinese students increasingly favor just a handful of institutions, while they do not serve the interests of the majority anymore.

The report attributes this trend to two root-causes: on the one hand, the growing fascination in China with university-rankings, and on the other, the relative weak tradition of institutional marketing and promotion of most public German universities. As German public institutions do relatively little to promote themselves in China and hardly contribute to mainstream study abroad narratives in the most used Chinese study abroad channels, such as Chinese social media and agents, Chinese students simply decide to go where the rankings tell them to go. We therefore recommend that German universities take more ownership of their own international positioning and branding, to ensure they maintain and strengthen their ability to attract Chinese and international talent into the future, especially in a period of declining domestic student numbers.

Read the full report here.