One in Eleven German Medical Students Is Enrolled Abroad

The figures: 8,821 Germans study medicine abroad

According to Federal Statistical Office data for the 2023/24 winter semester, at least 8,821 Germans were enrolled in a human medicine programme abroad. By way of comparison: in the 2024 winter semester a total of 103,176 German students were enrolled in human medicine at German universities. That means a good one in eleven German medical students is studying abroad.

An important qualification: the CHE itself points out that the data is incomplete. For several countries – Romania, Croatia or Slovakia, for instance – there are no reliable figures at all. And the statistics cover human medicine only. Dentistry, veterinary medicine and pharmacy abroad do not appear in them at all.

Gero Federkeil, Head of International Rankings at the CHE, puts it succinctly: studying medicine abroad has long since ceased to be an exception and is a real alternative for many – precisely because the number of study places in Germany remains limited.

Our estimate: closer to one in nine than one in eleven

The official figure is a lower bound, not a full account. Entire destination markets are missing from the statistics altogether: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, Georgia, Ukraine – and, depending on the survey year, Romania, Croatia and Slovakia too. Yet those are exactly where the locations that have grown fastest in recent years sit, because they are the cheapest.

There is a second gap on top of that: anyone who enrols abroad and is not deregistered or recorded anywhere in Germany appears in no statistics. And anyone who moves abroad only in their third or fifth year of study is likewise not cleanly counted in many surveys.

My estimate after ten years in this market: realistically it is closer to one in nine German medical students studying abroad – not one in eleven. That is an estimate, not a statistic, and I know the limits of an estimate. But it rests on what we see in applicant numbers, at the universities and in our own placement figures – including in exactly those countries that simply do not appear in the official statistics.

Where the Germans go

The most popular destination country is Austria by some distance. After that come the classic locations in Central and South-Eastern Europe:

Around half of all German medical students abroad are enrolled in the host country's regular national degree programmes – that is, alongside local students and in the local language. The other half study in dedicated international programmes, predominantly in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, mostly in English and at some locations in German.

A third variant is growing as well: cooperation models in which the preclinical phase is completed abroad and the clinical part in German hospitals – in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Kassel or Coburg, for example. The degree is awarded by the foreign institution.

The cost item: up to EUR 29,800 a year

The point at which the CHE guide is most emphatic: tuition fees of up to EUR 29,800 a year are possible on international programmes. Application, entrance or enrolment fees frequently come on top.

That range is real – but it is a range, not a price tag. Between the most expensive and the cheapest reputable location in Europe there is a difference of well over EUR 100,000 in tuition fees alone over six years. Anyone who knows the field does not study medicine in Europe for EUR 30,000 a year.

To put the EUR 29,800 in context: at the Faculty of Medicine in Foča (University of East Sarajevo), tuition for human medicine is around EUR 1,790 per semester, and dentistry around EUR 3,500 per year. At the Medical University of Varna it is around EUR 5,000 per semester. Calculated over six years, that is a six-figure difference – with a recognised degree in both cases.

English-language does not mean without the local language

One point from the CHE guide that we expressly endorse: even though many programmes advertise teaching in English, knowledge of the local language remains important in practice. By the clinical phase at the latest, in direct contact with patients, you will need it.

That is not an argument against studying abroad – it is an argument for planning the language course in from the start. Anyone who puts in four to six hours a week in the first year of study stands on the ward relaxed in the third.

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The surge since 2024 – and what is driving it

The CHE data relates to the 2023/24 winter semester. What has happened since appears in no statistics: since 2024 we have been seeing a surge unlike anything we knew before. And the motives have shifted markedly.

1. The labour market is being changed by AI

Many of those who write to us today are not coming straight from school. They are people in their early to mid-thirties, often with a completed degree and several years of work behind them – from marketing, IT, consulting, administration, media. Their reasoning is almost always the same: they see how quickly AI is taking over precisely the tasks they have been doing, and they want to move into a profession that cannot be automated away.

The medical profession is the most obvious example of that: physical examination, procedures on patients, personal responsibility, a statutory licence requirement. AI will change medicine – but it will not take responsibility for a diagnosis and will not operate on a patient.

2. Economic uncertainty in the private sector

The German and European private sector is in a difficult phase: job cuts in industry, hiring freezes, restructuring. Anyone living through that assesses job security differently than they did five years ago.

3. The public sector is no longer automatically regarded as secure either

The answer to economic uncertainty used to be the civil service. That too is now being questioned more sharply: the question of a leaner state is on the political agenda. In March 2026 the AfD parliamentary group introduced a motion in the Bundestag entitled „A lean state instead of a cost explosion – reducing civil-servant numbers and pension liabilities“; at state level, several AfD programmes contain calls for a lower state expenditure ratio and the cutting of established posts. Whether and how anything of the kind would ever be implemented is open – and other parties set different priorities. But the debate alone is enough for „a civil-service career equals security“ to be no longer taken for granted.

4. Medicine as a safe harbour

That leaves medicine. The shortage of doctors in Germany, Austria and Switzerland is structural and demographic in origin: the population is ageing, a large share of doctors in private practice will retire over the next few years, and demand is rising. That is not the business cycle, it is demography – and demography cannot be cut away.

That is why in consultations we now hear the sentence „I want to do something that will still be needed in twenty years“ more often than „I always wanted to be a doctor“.

In fairness, the other side belongs with it: medicine is a demanding route. Six years of study, then five to six years of specialist training, shift work, high responsibility. Someone starting in their early thirties will be a specialist in their mid-forties. Anyone taking this route should really want it.

Students abroad and the shortage of doctors

Perhaps the politically most interesting part of the CHE analysis: German medical students abroad are a relevant pool for future medical care. Anyone talking about a shortage of doctors should factor them in.

At the same time, the CHE concedes that there is no reliable official data on this. Individual institutions report that the majority of their German graduates return – that cannot be generalised. From our own experience: the great majority of those we place want to return to Germany, Austria or Switzerland. For them, studying abroad is not an emigration project but a route to the same goal.

What Medschool Experts has contributed to these figures

We will say it without false modesty: we have a significant share in this development. To date, Medschool Experts has placed more than 500 medical study places for clients from Germany, Austria and Switzerland – at more than 25 universities across Europe.

At least as important was the educational work. On the largest German-language YouTube channel on the subject – Medizinstudium im Ausland – we have for years explained free of charge which universities exist at all, what they really cost, how recognition works in Germany and Switzerland, and what matters when choosing. Much of what now counts as common knowledge about studying medicine abroad was first said there.

Why this affects us personally

For me this statistic is not an abstract figure. I was one of them myself.

I began my dentistry degree in 2015 at the Medical University of Sofia in Bulgaria – without a numerus clausus, in English – and completed it with the state examination in 2021. Today I am a Swiss-licensed dentist and live in Bern.

I therefore know both sides: the uncertainty at the start, when nobody in the family can say whether this is a good idea – and the feeling at the end, when the diploma is in your hand and the question about your school-leaving grade is never asked again.

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