Taking step one on the career path

RWTH Aachen, im Hörsaal by photocase user Peiler

And although some of the career preferences vary between men and women, eastern and western Germans (and between German and foreign students), business studies remains virtually everybody’s favorite in the academic landscape. So which degree courses make up Germany’s top five? Trailing business studies by a huge margin comes law (92,000 students), followed by German studies, engineering and medicine. Breaking it down by gender, the top five among men are business studies, engineering, computer science, electrical engineering and law, while female students go for business studies, German studies, medicine, law and education. Where to study?

The fact that Germany’s top five degree courses can be found at almost all the country’s major institutions truly widens your options as you search for the right place for you.

College rankings published by the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) highlight LMU Munich, Humboldt University Berlin, and the Universities of Freiburg, Göttingen, Constance and Tübingen as top choices for German studies. The CHE also surveyed departments with the best reputation among professors: in engineering, the highest scorers were RWTH Aachen, TU Darmstadt, TU Dresden, TU Munich, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, as well as Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Equally renowned for their medical schools are the universities in Freiburg, Heidelberg and Munich as well as several eastern German universities, including Greifswald, Halle-Wittenberg, Jena, Lübeck and Magdeburg. For law, the universities in Düsseldorf, Bayreuth, Frankfurt/Oder, Freiburg and Constance rank particularly highly among students. As is the case with nearly all of the top courses, students can earn a business studies degree at pretty much any German university, but topping the CHE rankings are Kiel University, LMU Munich and TU Munich, as well as Mannheim University. If engineering is your choice, you might want to consider one of the many universities of applied sciences. Or why not explore the growing number of private universities in Germany, many of which have built a strong a reputation over the past decade. Take, for example, Witten-Herdecke University (a good choice for medicine), Hamburg’s Bucerius Law School, or – for those with a knack for business and finance – the Hochschule für Bankwirtschaft in Frankfurt and Leipzig’s Handelshochschule.

Five favorite courses, five years later

Looking beyond the classroom, what type of jobs do graduates in the top five subjects land after college? Well, a large majority of students (87 percent) find a job within five years of graduation. And if you have an engineering degree, you’re even more likely to find employment right away. A degree in business studies prepares you for the widest variety of jobs. Surveys show that most business studies students head for multi-national companies with more than 1,000 employees (that’s also what engineers prefer, by the way). Typical career paths for business studies graduates include jobs in marketing, auditing, investment banking, consulting, and in some cases young professionals use the increasingly popular trainee programs at large companies as a stepping stone.

Money talks

Meanwhile, graduates from medical or law school must undergo a residency program or a clerkship. Medical residents usually spend this mandatory term in hospitals and are still completing their training five years after graduation. Moreover, half of all medical students have already completed their PhD by then. While legal clerkships are available in law firms of any size, large multi-national firms are also slowly opening up to aspiring lawyers: five years after law school, one third of all graduates has landed a job at a multi-national. In terms of earnings, engineers – assuming they end up in that profession after graduation – are in a near perfect situation, finding dream jobs with good pay. While the average income of young German employees five years after graduation is 46,800 EUR per year, engineers can easily earn 54,000 EUR. By contrast, the average German studies graduate earns 38,100 EUR. The income for law and medical school graduates hovers around the median. At the same time, however, they put in over 50 hours of work per week – the longest hours of all graduates.

Photo 1: photocase.com/Dr. Ralf Peiler/user: Peiler

Photo 2: photocase.com/Michael Wallner/user: badmike