Number of German students in border regions plummets

Fewer and fewer Germans are choosing to study in the Netherlands. The drop is particularly sharp in the border regions of Groningen, Twente and Arnhem/Nijmegen, where numbers are down by more than 20 percent.

Earlier this year, it was already evident that the number of German students in the Netherlands is declining. In 2020/2021, there were nearly 25,000 German students; by 2024/2025, that number had fallen to just 20,000.

Many of them traditionally head to the border regions; in Limburg, even one in six students is German. For a student from Aachen, Maastricht is easy to reach: the train ride is short, and visiting your parents every weekend or even continuing to live at home is perfectly feasible.

Compared to other border areas, the decline in Limburg is relatively mild. The number of German students there has dropped by around seven percent over the past three years, according to new figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). In other border areas, the decline is sharper.

Twenty percent

In Groningen, nearly 3,000 German students were enrolled in 2021/2022. By 2023/2024, that number had dropped to just 2,280 – a decrease of nearly 22 percent. In the border regions of Twente and Arnhem/Nijmegen, the number of German students has also fallen by more than 20 percent.

Student cities such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, Leiden and Delft also welcomed fewer German students in 2023/2024, but the decline there was less steep – between 2 and 10 percent.

The other way round

Germans are still the largest group of international students in the Netherlands. Conversely, relatively few Dutch students go to Germany for their studies: in 2021, the number was fewer than 2,000. They are more likely to opt for Belgium (around 4,000 students) or the United Kingdom (about 3,600 students).