Many school leavers in Saxony choose to study close to home

"There are certainly many reasons for the high number of people in Germany who are currently studying close to home, including the rise in energy and housing costs," said study director Marc Hüsch. "This development is in line with the results of the CHE University Ranking. Here, too, we are seeing a growing proportion of students, currently 28 percent, who still live with their parents." Admission restrictions and allocation procedures in some subjects such as medicine and psychology mean that the distances to home are greater. Women opt for a university further away more often than men.

The student body at the smaller universities in Saxony is even more strongly anchored locally. At the universities in Zittau/Görlitz and Zwickau, for example, around a quarter of the student body comes directly from the local district. However, some universities in the Free State score highly not only locally, but also internationally. According to the study, Chemnitz University of Technology and the Freiberg Mining Academy have a large number of students who gained their university entrance qualification abroad. At Chemnitz University of Technology, the proportion is almost 30 percent, at the Bergakademie even almost 40 percent - and thus significantly higher than at the much larger Saxon universities of Leipzig (10 percent) and Dresden (17.2 percent).