About & methodology
This site exists because the information an international student needs to make a good decision about studying in Germany is technically public but practically inaccessible: scattered across university subpages in German, PDFs dated two cycles ago, and Reddit threads where the most confident answer is not always the most accurate. We collect the facts that actually matter, check them against official sources, date every entry, and show our sources. When we cannot confirm something, the page says so.
How data is sourced
- Official pages first. Programme data comes from the university's own programme and admission pages, cross-checked against DAAD's international programme database. Secondary aggregators are used only for corroboration and are labelled as such.
- Every fact carries provenance. Each page ends with its sources and a "last checked" date. Deadlines change every cycle; a fact without a date is a rumour.
- Unknown stays unknown. When we can't confirm a value, the page says "not confirmed". We don't infer intakes, invent deadlines, or round fees. When two official pages contradict each other, we show a warning instead of silently picking one.
What we cover and why
Germany has around 400 public universities. We do not cover all of them. Stage 1 focuses on Master's programmes at Germany's leading technical universities: the institutions consistently ranked highest for engineering, computer science, and natural sciences, and the ones most searched by international students from quantitative and technical backgrounds. Within each university we profile both English-taught programmes and German-taught programmes where international students can realistically enrol with a stated language requirement (B2, DSH-2, or equivalent). German-taught programmes are included because excluding them would give a false picture of what is available: many of the most sought-after programmes at these universities are taught in German, and a student planning to learn German before applying has every right to see them alongside the English-taught options.
Coverage grows university by university. Each new university goes through the same five-pass research process: university record and fee model, programme discovery and shortlist, per-programme data collection, review and external link aggregation, and city and university guide. A university is not added until that process is complete and the data has passed our sourcing checks. The programme count you see on the homepage reflects what has been verified, not everything we know exists.
Independence and commercial model
This site has no commercial relationships with universities, agents, or visa services. No university pays to be listed, ranked higher, or described more favourably. There are no affiliate links to blocked-account providers, insurance companies, or housing platforms: we link to official sources and let you make your own choices. The site is funded by nothing except the time of the people building it. The reason for that is simple: a guide that earns money from the products it recommends cannot be fully trusted, and the students who need this information most are the ones who can least afford to act on bad advice.
How reviews are aggregated, and why we never quote
Student reviews are collected from public sources (StudyCheck, Reddit) and published only as paraphrased synthesis in our own words, with a link to the original source. Two reasons:
- Copyright and fairness: the original text belongs to its authors and its platform; a link sends you to it in context.
- Quality: a synthesis of recurring themes across many reviews is more useful than one person's strongest sentence. We state the sample size and note when it's small, and reviews with promotional bias (e.g. university-hosted testimonials) are excluded or labelled.
Aggregated reviews are clearly labelled as such; they are not verified submissions from students we've met. Verified first-hand reviews are planned for a later stage.
How often data is re-checked
Every record shows its own "last checked" date. Deadlines and fees are the fastest to rot: semester contributions change every semester, and application windows shift every cycle, so we re-verify these first. Where a figure is standard but not verbatim-confirmed (e.g. 120 ECTS for a two-year MSc), it is flagged in our internal gap log until confirmed.
Who builds this
Study Germany is built by Manav Dalvi, an MSc Data Science student at TU Dortmund who went through this process as an applicant and found the information landscape genuinely inadequate. The combination of a data science background and first-hand experience of the German university application process shaped both the methodology and the editorial standards: treat study-abroad guidance as an engineering problem, with structured data, explicit provenance, and honesty about uncertainty.
The site is not affiliated with TU Dortmund or any other university. Manav is a student there, not a representative of it. All data is collected independently from public sources, and the university has no involvement in what is published or how it is described.
Spotted something wrong or out of date? Corrections are welcome and treated as a priority: write to manavdalvi.md@gmail.com.
This page last checked . The methodology described here is applied to every record on the site.